Pirates & Parselmouths
by Safirefly
Summary: It's amazing how far back in time seven hours straight of twirling a Time-Turner will take you.
1. A Nearly Nameless Threat

Disclaimer: We do not own any characters you think you might from remember from two wildly popular movie series you may have seen before.

Claimer: Troth is ours. Because we always wanted a pet Rottweiler.

Authors note: I am co-writing this with BOTH my sisters- the sister who is Djinneya, and the sister who isn't. ;)

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><p>=Chapter 1: A Nearly-nameless Threat=<p>

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><p>"<em>Accio, glasses!"<em>

Harry's spectacles flew off his face, shooting straight into a black felt glove with pinprick copper stars sewn into the seams. Ten slim fingers inside the glove closed into a fist, crunching the glasses frame and lenses like toothpicks and sugar crystals. The fragments clittered to the cold, stony, sooty castle floor.

"Accio, wand!" shouted the strangely ageless-looking wizard. Snatching Harry's streaking wand out of the air, he aimed both it and his own sleek, palm-wood wand at Harry's frenzied face, and yowled, "_Crucio!"_

_"Expelliamus!"_ Hermione shrieked, also aiming her wand at Harry. He had no weapons to be disarmed of, but the force of the spell still knocked Harry backwards about twenty feet, well out of the way of the stranger's spell. Harry would have quite the backache, but at least he wouldn't be tortured. Hermione _would've_ just used the the disarming spell on Harry's foe, but _apparently_, the man was immune to it. "That was a dirty trick," Hermione hissed at the stranger, whose attention was now solely on her.

"We're _wizards _and _witches_," the stranger retorted in a slightly Mexican accent, as he kicked the little pile of crushed spectacles with the toe of his musketeer-style, cuffed boot. "'Tricks' is what we're all about."

But suddenly, his feet were invisibly knocked out from under him- he landed face-first, and the wands skidded out of his hands, rolling dizzily along the ancient castle cobblestones.

"Yeah, and sometimes the simplest ones are the best," sneered a voice which had not, even in his late twenties, ceased to grate on Hermione's nerves. "Impedimenta, for example. Oh- I also put an anti-Disapparation jinx on you, so feel free to _try_ escaping, but expect to be splinched."

"Hullo, Malfoy," Hermione sighed, as she joined the spindly, chalky-blond Auror beside the floored, disarmed wizard.

"The Ministry owes me a new pair of shoes," Malfoy growled, glancing down at his once-smart, once-shiny, black, patent leather shoes, which were now scuffed, thorn-stabbed, and mud-drenched.

"Honestly, who wears _formal_ shoes on an expedition to a _rainforest?" _Hermione retorted. "_A_nd why do you need the _Ministry _to replace them? You're _filthy_ rich."

I know. I just want to make the Ministry _pay_. Stupidest assignment _ever_..."

Hermione couldn't help agreeing somewhat- after _all,_ hunting down a nutcase Azkaban escapee, posing as a witch doctor deep in the Amazon, _was_ a _bit_ of an off-the-wall mission.

"Well, you could've at least _tried _dressing for the occasion," Hermione sighed.

In addition to the fancy shoes, Malfoy had worn a black button-up dress shirt and long dark jeans, during the Amazon's dry season, on a _92 degree_ day. His armpits and neckline were damp with sweat, and there were little streaks of tiny black legs and bug-wings smeared on his cheeks and stuck in his _formerly_ perfectly-combed hair. Since he'd _also_ forgotten his bug spray.

_She'd_ dressed a lot more traditionally for a jungle romp- khaki shorts, pocketed khaki vest over a cream, elbow-length shirt; black bandanna necktie, hiking boots, black, tan-striped stockings- and even a proper, British, straw, pith helmet-hat. Her own sweat was chilly now, since this castle was as cold as iced tea.

The strange wizard made a sharp grab for his wand, but Malfoy was quicker, and scooped it up promptly.

The stranger hissed an offensive-sounding Spanish word. On his outstretched arm, under the black cherry sleeve of his oddly slitted robe, just above one of his intricate gloves, Hermione caught sight of a depressingly familiar mark... A twisting skull and snake. "You're a Deatheater, then?" she asked coldly.

"_However_ did you guess?" the stranger retorted from under his black, shoulder-length hair, with a foxy, half-hidden smirk, which made his high cheekbones jut out from his narrow face. He was awfully good-looking, Hermione noticed uncomfortably, and not nearly as old as her first guess. He was possibly even a year or two _younger _than her.

"How come you still have your mark?" Hermione demanded. "I mean- Voldemort can't be _back_- right?"

Malfoy hastily tugged up his left sleeve, to check where he'd been marked with the same symbol while Voldemort lived, but there was nothing there but an old, pale scar.

The stranger casually slid a handful of fingers through his fine hair- and Hermione noticed four slender, rust-hued highlights in the black strands- two above each ear. He then slid one angular arm under his shirtless chest, and tried to push himself up, but Malfoy jabbed both his wand and the stranger's down towards the man's face, and said,

"One move, just _one,_ and I'll _Defodio_ you."

"Malfoy!" Hermione scolded. "Defodio is a tunneling spell, for gouging holes in solid rock, not in _people!"_

"I know," he retorted coolly.

"You simply _can't _use that on him, that'd be practically black magic!" she hissed back.

"Last I checked though, it's not _unforgivable_ black magic. Actually, it's not even registered as black magic in the Ministry registers, so I'd prob'lly get away with it. Oh, I still can't _believe _this..." Malfoy went on crossly. "-I sign up to be an Auror on the Hit Wizards Department to regain my _completely_ crushed social status, and _what _does the Ministry do? They say, 'Oh look, Weasley's called in sick, why don't we partner _Malfoy_ up with Potter's regiment? Yeah, sounds _brilliant_, they'll get on spiffy, _won't _they? Betcha one-to-three they start killing each other nine hours into the job! That's _okay,_ we don't like them anyhow!"

"Speak for yourself," Harry called across the room.

Scowling profusely, Hermione snapped, "_Aren't_ you supposed to be out guarding the tent?"

"Well _so _sorry, Weasley, I just got a _smidgen_ bored staring at a patch of n_othing_ in the middle of the _blazing hot _jungle for _nine _hours straight," Malfoy scoffed back. "Must be my short attention span."

"Well you could've just used an Aparecium spell so you could _see _the tent- hold up, nine hours?" Hermione interrupted herself in disbelief. "Oh, quit exaggerating."

"Easy for you to say, you've been here in this air-conditioned castle all the while!" Malfoy retorted huffily. "It's been _precisely_ nine hours- I've been keeping track. Unlike _some _people, _I_ can afford a watch."

"Harry, didn't we only _just_ come in here about four minutes ago before this- whoever-he-is, attacked us?" Hermione called over to Harry, who had finally retrieved his wand. He'd probably had a rough time of it without his glasses.

"Yeah, 'bout that," Harry agreed, as he limped dizzily over to the group from across the grand, ancient room, while cautiously rubbing his scraped back. The eroded, almost jagged stone floor had sheared through the skin on his elbows, and they were dripping blood- they'd hit the ground the hardest when Hermione had knocked him backwards. "_Thanks_, by the way," he added dryly.

"You're welcome," Hermione replied primly, choosing to ignore the sarcasm.

"So where's Mrs. Potter?" Malfoy asked Harry absently.

Harry shot a deathly glare at a patch of wall to the left of Draco. "She's _dead_, as you well know- as the whole Wizarding World well knows!" Harry retorted caustically.

"So what _else_ happened in the past nine hours I should know about?"

"What are you saying- my mum's been dead for years!"

"So does losing your glasses make you thick as well as blind as a bat?" Malfoy drawled dryly.

"And actually," Hermione couldn't help putting in, "recent research has shown that bats do in fact possess photoreceptor cells in their retinas consisting of cones as well as rods, so even though they do have echolocation, they can also see fairly through their eyes, even in daylight, so the phrase 'blind as a bat' is somewhat scientifically outdated, when you think about it. Oh, and by 'Mrs. Potter', Malfoy meant _Ginny_, Harry," Hermione sighed. "Remember?"

The wedding had been scarcely a week ago, and Harry was obviously still getting used to the idea of Ginny being his wife.

"Oh. Right, Ginny," Harry said sheepishly, glancing up at the little candy-green and pink parakeet flitting in-and-out of the curling ironwork of the chandelier overhead. "Um, she's a bit transfigured right now, but we'll get it sorted."

Hermione spotted an empty pair of light blue cut-off jeans, a tie-died T-shirt, and matching pair of aqua undies and bra, lying in a crumpled pile on the sooty castle cobbles. "What, you couldn't even Tranfigure her clothes with her?" she snapped down at the robed stranger. "What sort of fifth-rate wizard are you?"

The stranger simply shrugged, and gave an unhinging smile. _He's staring at my legs, _Hermione realized queasily. She shot him a treacherous scowl.

"Don't fret it, Ginny!" Harry called up to the chandelier. "Look, I know you're a bird right now and can't understand a word I'm saying, but you've really gotta just hold still so I can turn you back, okay?"

"Oh, let _me,_ you _idiot_," Draco snapped. "I'm better at Transfiguration anyway, and you're blind, practically. You'd probably turn us all into hedgehogs or ferrets or some equally _stupid _animals by mistake."

Harry crossly crossed his arms over his wrinkled indigo T-shirt, concealing the pale orange, flaming phoenix design, while his elbows dripped blood onto the wizard band name 'Threnody'.

"Wait!" Hermione protested, sharply grabbing Malfoy's raised wand-arm, "You can't do that!"

"Yes I can, I'm top-of my class at Transfiguration."

"No, actually _I _am. And you _do_ realize that if her clothes are in a pile over _there_... she'll be- besides, you can't just turn Ginny back _midair,_ look at the height of that chandelier! She'll fall!"

"She'll heal," Malfoy retorted with a shrug, irritably jerking his arm out of Hermione's clenched fingers. "And haven't you ever heard of the Feather-Fall charm?" But just as he was about to fire off the un-Transfiguration spell, his eyes flew back down to the stranger, who was moving slightly.

Seeing that Malfoy's wandering wand had sprung back towards his face, the stranger yawned widely, like a cat, showing off needly teeth. "Well, this isn't dull at _all,_ is it?" he droned dryly. "I fancy I'd just fall asleep now, if this floor wasn't so cold. You know, you'd _think _that instead of all this squabbling small talk, you three'd be asking me a parcel of glaringly obvious questions, such as, 'Who _are _you, you dastardly rogue?', or 'Why do you live in a tent sewn of invisibility cloaks which is bigger on the inside than the outside, and in fact houses an entire castle on the inside?' To which I would probably retort: 'How in bloody blue blazes did two young wizards and their girlfriends, bumbling aimlessly through-'"

"Ginny's my _wife,_" Harry corrected severely, and again glared in Malfoy's general direction. "So if anyone's going to un-Transfigure her, it'll be _me!"_

"And I'm _absolutely_ not _his _girlfriend," Hermione added stringently, nodding her frizzled head of hair head sideways towards Malfoy. "I'm also married, to a totally _different_ person."

"Don't interrupt, it's rude," the stranger chided.

"It was important," Hermione snipped back. She was really starting to miss Ron...

"_As_ I was saying," the stranger continued, ignoring her, "_I_ would retort: 'How in bloody blue blazes did two young wizards, the wife of one of the wizards, and the non-girlfriend of the other one, bumbling aimlessly through the Amazon jungle, just happen to _accidentally _discover my insanely well-concealed secret lair? And while we're on the subject of unasked questions- you there," he said to Harry, "_she _addressed you as 'Harry', and _he_ addressed you as 'Potter'. So as I doubt _he's_ the one on first-name basis," the stranger added, pointing up and over his shoulder at Malfoy (who was rolling his eyes), "That'd be _'Harry Potter',_ wouldn't it?"

"Yeah, sorta," Harry admitted warily.

"Any relation of the Boy Who Lived?" the stranger asked curiously.

"Guess you could _say_ that..." Harry replied slowly.

"Uncle, perhaps?"

"No!"

"Oh. Godfather?"

Harry exchanged a 'what-the-heck?' expression with Hermione- or at least with the pillar to the right of her. His eyesight really was pathetic without his glasses.

"Second cousin?" the stranger guessed again, doggedly refusing to drop the matter. "Idol little Harry was named after? C'mon, help me out here!"

Draco snickered. "I seriously think he doesn't know! Oh, this is rich."

"He's _the _Harry Potter," Hermione sighed, raising an eyebrow and cocking her head to the side. "What, do you live under a rock?"

"No, I live in a rock castle under a time-altering enchantment and an invisibility tent," the stranger retorted flatly. "_T__he _Harry Potter, you say?" he asked Harry. "I imagined you so much shorter!"

Harry looked surprised- most people he met said, 'I imagined you taller'.

A few paces away, Hermione noticed a pile of half-packed suitcases. Wandering over to it, she lifted the leather-buckled lid of one. "Going somewhere?" she asked, staring back towards the stranger.

"That's better, a touch of healthy curiosity!" he said, beaming.

Hermione squinted curiously down at a rolled-up newspaper stuffed into the corner of the open suitcase. Picking it up and unrolling it, Hermione saw that it was a crisp, brand-new printing of the Daily Prophet- with the shocking cover story of 'THE BOY WHO LIVED: BABY WIZARD DECIMATES HE-WHO-MUST-NOT-BE-NAMED!' Holding it up and flashing the moving picture of the headline story towards the stranger, Hermione asked sharply, "Why is this newspaper brand-new?"

"Ah..." he purred, "but I should _think _you'd, instead, be asking the most glaringly obvious question of all: 'Why, oh _why_, are you so famous that nobody knows your name?'" He said this random sentence with an enthrallingly dramatic flair, and waited a good long moment for it to sink in, before adding, "But since none of you seem to be _curious _enough to ask _that_, may I get up now?"

"Not unless you want to be gauged apart like a rock wall," Malfoy warned icily.

"But the floor is cold and my chest is bare," the nameless wizard complained sulkily.

"Serves you right for not wearing a shirt under your robe... thing," Hermione retorted, not sure what to make of the open-fronted, jaggedly-layered, red-black robe, with all the decorative gashes cut into it along the sleeves and hems. "Oh gosh," she said suddenly, excitably, "say that thing you said again?"

"Can... I... get... up?" the stranger repeated slowly.

"No- no- _before_ that!"

"You're not curious?"

"Before!"

"Why are you so famous that nobody knows your name?" he repeated blankly.

"Yes! That!" Hermione exclaimed brightly.

"Care to let the _rest of us_ in on your inexplicable and wholly un-contagious glee, Granger?" Malfoy drawled sarcastically.

"Harry, I _know_ him!" Hermione chirped, ignoring Malfoy.

"You do?" Harry, Draco, and the stranger asked simultaneously.

"Well, not _personally, _naturally," Hermione clarified.

"Well, we can change that," the stranger invited suggestively.

Hermione glared and conspicuously fiddled with her shiny new wedding ring, then said in a sickly sweet tone, "Oh yes, I'm sure we can have a lovely long chat as we drag you back to Azkaban."

"But he's not _even_ the 'witch doctor' we were sent to fetch back to Azkaban!" Malfoy complained.

"But he _ought_ to be in Azkaban," Hermione replied darkly. "This is _Riksamiren Troth_, but his friends- and there were precious few of those- called him Rule-dodger Rik- or sometimes just 'Dodger'. He had a habit of of sticking to power like paste, so of course, when Voldemort was brought to Hogwarts as an exceptionally magic-gifted youngster, Troth lost no time in becoming Tom Riddle's 'best-ever' friend, despite the fact that Riddle was a Slytherin and Troth was a Hufflepuff- who happened to be obsessed with dark voodoo arts. When Voldemort's power grew, and he broke off his old school ties to become the wizarding world's greatest threat, Troth became sort of Voldemort's pet Rottweiler, as it were- his thick-as-thieves first mate. Even though Rik Troth was always in the shadows, he was Voldemort's most valuable Deatheater."

"Funny _I've _never heard of him," Malfoy muttered.

"Oh hush, I wasn't finished yet," Hermione bit back. "See, everybody knew who he _was,_ but nobody knew his _name_. No one made the connection that he was that Hufflepuff prankster who'd hung out with Voldemort during their schoolboy days. No, Troth had a habit of fading into the shadows. Then one day, Troth broke away from Voldemort and his gang, to walk his own path, and came out of the shadows, into the light... but everybody would've much preferred it if he'd _stayed_ in the shadows. Troth began a rampage, constantly terrorizing everybody, wizards and Muggles alike; and he was all anybody could talk about for half a year- and then he vanished a during the first Wizarding War, and _that_ was all anybody could talk about. Then _you _were born, Harry, and well, you lived," she added, glancing back at 'THE BOY WHO LIVED!' headline newspaper in her hands, "and I suppose the fantasticness of _that _sort of drove Troth out of everyone's minds."

Troth's hands started lazily clapping; once, twice, three times. "Bravo, girl!" he said with mock-enthusiasm. "I should hire you to write my biography. But for the record, my short-lived glory days of power occurred quite a goodish bit _before _the Wizarding War, when _Tom_ was in the shadows. But even though you royally jumbled the facts, that was still pretty impressive. Do tell, _where_, oh _where,_ did you learn all that? I thought I'd Confundoed all knowledge of my existence out of the mind's eye of the general public."

"You can't make _books_ forget," Hermione retorted smugly.

"But you _can_ burn them," Troth countered. "But obviously, I didn't burn _enough._ Why, you ask- or _haven't _asked- did I erase myself from the public's memories and 'crawl back into the shadows', and hide myself in Tom's old secret lair- this dusty castle, as a matter-of-fact- which I moved by the way- inside this tent of invisibility cloaks enchanted to work like one of those carry-all purses, and also enchanted so that time would stand still on the inside, and life in the Amazon and everywhere else would just keep going on without me? Well, _that's _another of those superbly-obvious questions, with a just-as-superbly-obvious answer. Tom never could cope with betrayal. I really think it all started with the mark- he burned it into the arms of all the others in the old gang- Avery, Lestrange, Rosier, Mulciber, Nott, all of them... but I wasn't _too _fond of Riddle having me marked as his personal slave- and bound to him magically to boot. So I just tattooed the mark in- I've always been fond of needles anyway." Troth's thin lips parted into a sliver-moon smile as he said this, but the look faded fast. "But Tom wasn't amused, and tried to forcibly mark me his-" Troth's angular shoulders shrugged lightly up off the cobbles. "-so I ran. But not before stealing a single lock of Tom's black hair, and a few fingernail clippings."

Hermione's brown eyes widened tautly. "Oh, you did _not!._.." she gasped.

"What?" Harry asked, sounding thoroughly puzzled. "What did he not?"

"You tried to make a _voodoo poppet doll_, of _Lord Voldemort?_" Hermione exclaimed, in absolute bewilderment.

"What's a voodoo poppet doll?" Harry asked.

Troth shrugged again. "Well, if you can puppeteer the most powerful wizard in the Wizarding World, that sorta makes _you _the most powerful wizard in the Wizarding World, comprende? Tom always thought my voodoo nothing but parlor tricks, and had no interest whatever in it- and _no_ idea how it worked. So, for a very little while, _he_ was _my_... pet Rottweiler, was it you said? But once he did free himself from my little hex, oh, _then _there was hell to pay. Tom swore he'd hunt me down, pluck out my eyeballs and feed them to his pet snake, Crucio me, flay me to shreds with a nasty little spell which good kids like you shouldn't even know about, pull my brain out through my nostrils like an Egyptian mummy- only I'd be alive- and... and I've spent a _lot_ of time trying to forget the rest. So, obviously, I ran again. I thought it easiest to let the rest of the world just pass on by, and hide out in my own little storm shelter until the tornado which was Lord Voldemort had blown over." Pausing, Troth glanced directly up at Hermione's eyes. "Are you getting all this, Miss? Because I really want my biography to be _spot-on_ when you pen it- not like that _first _one you told. Anyways, now that Tom's well and truly gone- assuming the press got it right," Troth added, gazing at the newspaper Hermione was still holding, "there's this lovely, enormous power vacuum just waiting to be filled..." he finished ominously.

"What do Muggle cleaning contraptions have to do with anything?" Malfoy asked irritably.

Hermione saw Troth reach towards his neck as if to scratch it, saw a peep of something gold, recognized the shape- and was too late to stop the inevitable. She just stared down, petrified, at the empty space where Troth had just been.

All three of the young Aurors stood in silent shock for a moment, as Ginny wheeled overhead, chirping sunnily.

"Did he Apparate?" Harry asked weakly.

"No, I saw to that," Draco replied in a voice like cardboard.

Hermione just shook her head. Her jaw stiffened as she struggled to say,

"Harry... do you remember- our third year at Hogwarts... the Time-Turner?"

"Oh, _blimey_," Harry mumbled.


	2. Paparazzi

(Author's note: Troth is cast as Ben Barnes. (Because doesn't_ everyone_ who sees Prince Caspian's sweet baby face think, 'wow, he'd make a great evil psycho voodoo Deatheater!' Right?))

Disclaimer: We did not claim to be sane.

Claimer: We are sane! (there, now we've claimed it).

Disclaimer 2: But we never claimed to be honest... ;)

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><p>=Chapter 2: Paparazzi=<p>

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><p>The man who was so famous that nobody knew his name prowled Knockturn Alley like he owned the place, or would soon. Along with the rest of the Wizarding World.<p>

_Ah! There he is! It's him!_ Troth thought elatedly, spotting a night-haired, glasses-wearing boy covered in soot. _He's alone & unprotected! Oh goody!_

Tiptoeing up behind the Boy Who Lived (but wouldn't pretty soon), Troth tossed a gold chain around Potter's neck, and said, "Hullo, I'm giving out free samples of gold necklaces, why don't you try one on for size?"

"Ahh!" Potter yelped, jumping an inch in shock, and dropping the two halves of his glasses to the alley cobbles as he grabbed the chain around his neck reflexively, like he thought he was being strangled.

"Yes, I know, it's a shockingly unbelievable deal!" Troth rattled hastily, while tightening his grip on the necklace, and dropping down to his knees so that he could slip the other gold chain that was attached to the first one around his own neck. It was kind of undignified for a future world ruler, but one day, the rest of the world would be bowing down to _him_. And it _wouldn't _be because they were trying to throw a chain around his neck to Time-Turner him away. "Hold _still_ would you!" he ordered Harry, while trying to spin the little hourglass thing on the Time-Turner.

Suddenly Troth was being grabbed by the collar of his gash-sleeved vermilion robe, and hoisted up off his feet- which also made the gold necklace around Harry's neck scrape up Harry's chin as it was tugged up and off.

"Ow, ow, ow!" yelped the Boy Who Lived, who was now left with a very bad case of chain-burn on his neck.

"This 'ere bloke botherin' ya, Harry?" the lumbering, bearded newcomer asked gruffly.

"Hagrid?" Harry said, squinting through his glasses-less eyes. "Hey, have you seen my glasses?"

"Can't say I have..." Hagrid muttered, dropping Troth distractedly, and beginning to search the cobblestones with Harry.

Seeing said glasses-halves on the dusty ground, so close to his own eyes that they could've been on his own nose, Troth grabbed them quickly, and hid them behind his back as he stood up, sticking them in one of his robe's hidden pockets.

"You know," he said brightly stepping up behind Harry again, "I could trade you a pair of... _gently used_ glasses, in exchange for... say... you agreeing to model my gold chain necklace for me!"

And with no more warning than that, Troth picked Harry up, stood him atop an old barrel (so that he wouldn't have to kneel this time), and tossed the necklace over Harry's neck again, this time from the front. "Just stand right there until my cameraman gets here, and don't mind me twirling this thing, I'm just trying to adjust it to the exact right angle for the best possible shot! Oh and-" grabbing the top of Harry's nose, Troth twisted his head to the left, and added, "-that's your good side."

"'agrid!" Potter complained in a voice made squeaky by the fact that his nose was being pinched.

Hagrid looked up from where he'd been searching on hands and knees for Harry's glasses, a few yards away. "Hey you!" the groundskeeper called over irritably, "what'd I tell ya 'bout leaving that boy be?" Hagrid rushed over and snatched Troth by the collar yet again, yet again tugging him off his feet, and yet again tugging Harry's necklace off his neck- and toppling him off the barrel to boot.

"Ow, _owww._..." Harry moaned.

"I do hope you realize you're interrupting a promising modeling career," Troth informed Hagrid dryly.

"Look, he's not interested-" Hagrid huffed, but his sentence trailed off, and his eyes narrowed below his shrubby eyebrows. "Don' I know you?"

"No," Troth retorted flatly, glaring icily at the overgrown kid from care of magical creatures class. _Why did Tom frame __him__ anyway?_ Troth wondered. _Honestly, who would believe __Hagrid__ was the heir of Slytherin? _Troth wished Hagrid had _stayed _framed and locked in Azkaban, _and it would've also been nice if he had been stunted in growth at age 14 and __not__ grown above 7 foot 8, so that my feet were not quite so __very__ far off the ground, _Troth mentally added.

"Are you sure?" Hagrid asked suspiciously, sticking his huge nose in Troth's face.

"Sure?" Troth repeated blankly, blinking himself out of past memories.

"Sure that I don' _know_ ya?" Hagrid specified.

"Oh. Yes. Quite sure. Never met you. Complete strangers, we are."

"Well, d'ya know who _he_ is?" Hagrid challenged, pointing one thick finger at Harry, with his free hand.

Potter was still tripping and hitting into a warehouse wall, a barrel, and an unlit lamppost, due to the fact that he couldn't see worth beans without his glasses.

"No, clue," Troth replied cluelessly.

"He's _THE _Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, who killed_ He-who-must-not-be-named!_ An' he's _my_ pal, so go hawk yer petty pedlar wares an cheap costume jewelry ta some other poor sucker, if ya know what's good fer ya!"

Troth _knew _what was good for him. It involved Time-Turnering Potter back into the past, and getting rid of him, and filling power vacuums. Troth also knew spinach was good for him, but he wasn't about to eat any. However, all Troth said was, "Oh, _so _sorry, I didn't _realize_."

_"Start_ realizin'," Hagrid warned, setting Troth down roughly, and leading Potter away by the hand.

So Troth turned around, shrugged to himself, and left the two on their own to search for the absentee glasses. There would be other opportunities. _Now lets see..._ Troth thought, _if I were a red-haired girl, a Malfoy, or a smart-alec girl, where would I be?_ He decided to go with the most predictable choice, which was the smart-alec girl. _The bookstore, of course._

Smiling to himself at this brilliant bit of deductive reasoning, Troth strolled off to go ask directions.

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><p>Lucius Malfoy and Arthur Weasley were arguing over ridiculous things, like books, and money, and Muggles. They were squabbling like schoolboys, and making quite a spectacle of themselves. As much of a spectacle as the new pair of specs perched on Potter's nose as he wandered into the bookstore.<p>

_Ah, brilliant!_ Troth thought, as he spotted the smart-alec girl in the crowd too. Now all his cards were in one place. _Now just to collect them..._

"Harry! What happened to your glasses?" the smart-alec girl exclaimed. She was so much _smaller_ at age twelve...

"I had to buy new ones," Harry mumbled.

"But why the green lenses?"

"The shopkeeper insisted they matched my eyes, and I thought he meant they were the right prescription for my level of shortsightedness."

"Oh, no sort of glasses could fix _your_ level of shortsightedness, Potter," sneered Lucius's annoying little look-alike brat.

_Lucius probably couldn't even __bribe__ any girls into marrying him, _Troth speculated nastily._ So he probably just cloned himself. I bet he named the twit 'Junior'. _But, turning his thoughts away from obscure conspiracy theories about the man who took his place as Tom's favorite, and deciding not to let his moment slip away, Troth leaped straight into 'Phase 1#; Distract The Adults.'

"Oh look, oh look! Lockheart's being strangled to death by a snake in an invisible stocking!" he yelped. "Somebody, help him!"

"Oh dear," Arthur Weasley said. He instantly turned around to wrestle his way through the crowd of Lockheart's dreamy-eyed, gasping, useless fan-girls, to help poor Lockheart.

Lucius Malfoy, however, was more stubborn, and his shoes hadn't moved an inch, and coincidentally, neither had his feet, nor any other part of his body, except his arms, which folded in front of his chest. "And why," he drawled in his high-handed, slithery voice, "should _we_ care?"

"Because I'm a news reporter," Troth invented on the spot , "and it would be wonderful publicity for you! But I suppose _Weasley _shall have to be the headlining hero on the front page of tomorrow's Saturday paper..."

"But _tomorrow's_ Tuesday," the smart-alec girl mentioned.

"Who asked you, smart-alec girl?" Troth snapped between grit teeth, which were forced into a fake smile.

Lucius was looking at Troth inquisitively now, with snake slit eyes. "Do I... know you?" Lucius wondered dourly.

"No!" Troth yapped. "_Nobody_ knows me here! I made sure of that!"

Everybody (except Arthur Weasley) now turned their shocked stares away from the flamboyantly self-centered, rather blue-faced Gilderoy Lockheart, and towards Troth.

"Er... that is... I'm an undercover reporter," Troth explained awkwardly.

"Then, whyever did you just_ tell _us you're an undercover reporter?" the smart-alec girl chimed in.

"Oh look," Troth exclaimed nervously, "Arthur Weasley was just bitten by the invisible and probably incredibly deadly snake! The venom will probably melt his brain and make it fall out his nose, and turn his skin black as ash, and make his fingernails fall off, and gauge out his eyes any moment now, unless someone gets him the proper medical help!"

"I don' think there's a snake livin' which can do all them things ya jus' said," Hagrid argued. "In fact, most snakes are 'armless as kittens."

"Kittens can be pretty harmful," Troth said, inconspicuously snatching the collar of the red-haired girl, as all her fellow Weasleys rushed off to help Arthur.

"Come along, son," Lucius snapped in a clipped tone, "we'll order our books by mail."

"Coming," Junior replied.

Lucius cast one last, smug glance towards the half-strangled celebrity, the supposedly snake-bitten would-be hero, and all Arthur's red-haired clan, then sauntered out the bookshop door, dragging one of Troth's cards behind him.

_Well, I can still get the other three..._ Troth was just trying to figure out how to ditch the giant (who had just noticed that Troth had his hand over the wide-eyed red-head girl's mouth), when the entire bookshop was flooded with a medical team, and a few Aurors to boot.

Deciding that the whole scene was marvelously distracting, but figuring that a room packed wall-to-wall with people was a _bit_ too conspicuous for a triple kidnapping, Troth released the schoolgirl's mouth and collar. He decided he'd best try his hand another time, another place.

Like Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.


	3. The Substitute

Disclaimer: We don't own a Time-Turner, ergo we cannot go back in time and direct and produce the _Harry Potter_ and P_irates of the Caribbean_ films ourselves, and pretend that they were our ideas all along, and get insanely rich. Ergo, we don't own them.

Author's note: Out of morbid curiosity, is anyone even reading this?

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><p>=Chapter 3: The Substitute=<p>

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><p>The stairs were going screwy. Draco hadn't noticed it at first, but after every<em> single <em>staircase he stepped one foot on swung hypnotically toward the astronomy tower, and all the staircases behind and below him COLLAPSED, even Crabbe and Goyle couldn't help noticing _something_ was screwy.

Especially after they got left behind on one of said collapsing stairs...

If Professor McGonagall _dared _take points off of Slytherin House for Draco being late for Transfiguration class, he was going to write a letter of complaint to his father, who would in turn write a letter of complaint to the Board of School Directors.

Personally, Draco was wondering whether he should keep going up- which would bring him into a distastefully close proximity to that filthy little blood-traitor first-year redhead Weasley girl on the next stair up- or whether he should just stay where he was was until she walked through the door she seemed to be contemplating walking through. Which was the same door _he_ would have to walk through, since it was the only way to go besides down. Which was a _long _drop, judging from when he heard Goyle and Crabbe crash.

As Draco waited for the Weasley snippet to go first, he suddenly realized that that would be demeaning. _Why should she go first? It's not like she's even a lady!_ Deciding to risk coming within five feet of the Weasley, Draco stalked rapidly past her, snatched the door-latch, and entered the Astronomy Tower first. He had to stalk up one final step of spiraling, non-moving stairs, to get to the tower roof.

"You're late!" scolded a voice with a gratingly familiar accent.

"How can I be late, I'm not even supposed to _be_ here!" Draco snapped.

"Well, I'm sure you're late for something then. Ten points from Slytherin!"

"I'm writing a letter of complaint-" Draco began huffily, then paused in petrified disbelief. "-Hey, _aren't_ you that nutters newsie from the bookshop?"

"No, I'm the substitute Astronomy teacher," replied the newsie chirpily. "Tragically, Professor Sinistra tripped off the tower parapets while peering through her telescope during midmorning, and accidentally blinding herself by staring at the sun. Sad, eh?"

"Um, excuse me..." trilled the annoying Wealey blood-traitor girl. "I think my class schedule's wrong..." she said softly, practically hiding behind a sheet of paper, and staring fixedly at Potter over the top of it.

_She probably snuck up here on purpose, just to gawk at him,_ Malfoy thought snidely.

"Oh, too bad, class has already started," the newsie said with a strangely manic, gleeful expression, dragging her in by the hand, slamming the door shut behind her, and shoving her into Draco's side. "You pair up with tardy albino clone," the newsie told the girl, "and Potter, your partner will be the smart-alec girl, and the rest of you... just pair up with whoever. Who cares."

"_What _did you just call me?" Draco asked the newsie in aghast disbelief, while shoving the Weasley brat as far away from him as he could.

"Oh yes," the newsie replied brightly, "I've just been dying to ask, kid- do you have a mum?"

"...I'm not even going to condescend to lower myself to answer that!" Draco all but snarled.

"I knew it! Clone."

"_Course_ I have a mum!" Draco burst out snappishly.

"Curious..." the newsie said contemplatively. "So what did Lucius do, drug the poor girl?"

"...I don't have to stand for this!" Draco exclaimed after another shocked, wordless pause.

"Well you could always take it lying down."

_He is getting sacked, he is __so__ getting sacked! _Draco thought venomously. "I suppose you think you're terribly funny," he said snippily. Noticing Potter and his friends and all the other students on the roof were practically _chortling, _Draco swerved his glare on them, and added, "I suppose _you_ think he's terribly funny!"

Sniggering behind his hands, Potter's atrocious friend Ronald Weasley snorted, "Well, _yeah."_

That was_ it. _Draco whipped out his wand, but before he could hurl a nasty curse at Weasley's smug, round, freckly, beady-eyed face, the silver-blond's wand was being tugged up out of his fingers by the newsie, who was too cheap to even use a proper disarming spell. _Really, tugging someone's wand out of their fingers with one's bare hands-_ _barbaric._ _I mean, who __does__ things like that?_ Draco wondered, appalled. _And a teacher, no less?_

However, it didn't matter that Draco hadn't blasted Weasley with wand-magic, because Weasley had instinctively pulled out his own wand, which promptly backfired on him.

_Idiot. _"Give me my wand back!" Draco hissed, futilely jumping up to try to grab it back as the newsie mockingly bobbed it above his head.

"No fighting in class," the newsie said, stuffing the wand somewhere in the folds of his absurd red robe. "Weasley, that goes for you too. Twenty-four points from Gryffindor."

"But-" Weasley protested, gaping, "-ow- the only person I- ow- hit, was me!"

"Thirty-nine points from Gryffindor for talking back to a teacher," the newsie replied smoothly. "Now class... find the Big Dipper."

It was harder to _miss_ than it was to find. It was looming in the sky directly in front of the students, as huge and obvious as a flying elephant.

"Why the _deuce _do we need to _pair up _to find the Big Dipper?" Draco demanded irritably.

"Ninety-seven points from Slytherin for asking questions in class," the newsie said curtly.

_"What?"_

"Ninety-seven _more_ points."

Draco shut his mouth reluctantly, clenching his teeth. This_ had_ to be a joke.

Judging from the fact that Granger's mouth was wide open, and then closed reluctantly, she probably had an unasked question on the tip of her tongue too.

"Now, has everyone spotted the Big Dipper yet?" the newsie said, pointing directly at it, in case anyone was blind enough to have _missed _it.

"Yeah," Draco scoffed, "you're sort of _pointing_ at it."

"Ooh, very _good_ mini-Malfoy!" the newsie warbled mock-proudly, while patting Draco on the head, and then rustling his gloved fingers through Draco's pale hair roughly.

"Ow!" Draco yelped, as the newsie plucked out a few whitish hairs, stared at them curiously, and stuck them into another one of his impossible cape's pockets. Draco swiped his hair back viciously, as if trying to forever rid it of the appalling memory of the newsie git's glove.

"Right then," the git continued, "Class dismissed. "No no-" he added swiftly, flapping his cape out wide, and cornering Draco up next to Potter, Granger, and the little Weasley girl, "-not _you _four. You're detained after class for... remedial astronomy."

"What _for?_" Draco growled.

"Well, no _wonder _you haven't any curiosity ten years from now, you used it all up!" the newsie said randomly, sounding inspired. "Oh yes, Ninety-seven more points from Slytherin for asking questions in class. But whilst we're on the subject- _you're_ being kept after class for tardiness, your short redhead partner is being kept after class for being mis-scheduled, and Potter is being kept after class for wearing green spectacles, which is outright flouting the dress code."

"It is not!" Granger argued hotly, obviously not able to _contain _herself when it came to defending Harry Potter and pointing out rules. "There's_ nothing_ in the dress code that specifies what tint students' glasses must be! I know, I've read every article!"

"Know-it-all," Draco muttered.

"-And _you're _being kept after class for being a smart-alec," the newsie informed Granger dryly.

"This is preposterous..." she grumbled under her breath.

Draco found himself wholeheartedly agreeing with her- and was seriously annoyed by that fact. "I don't believe you_ really_ have any sort of teaching license," he snapped at the newsie. "Where's your credentials? I daresay you're just aiming to get a story- some 'secret' scoop on Hogwarts, is it, _undercover newspaper reporter_?"

"As much as I hate to agree with _Malfoy-_" Granger began reluctantly, obviously just as irritated about their present like-mindedness as he was.

"Shut up!" Draco interrupted. "I hate you agreeing with me too! It's demeaning, and greatly reduces the value of my opinion!"

"And what _is_ the value of 'your opinion'?" the newsie asked, reaching one his hands frightfully close to Draco's ear, and then pulling out a pair of pennies, from, apparently, behind the ear, but most likely, from the cuff of his glove. "Two cents?" the newsie finished mischievously, as if he'd _actually _done something impressive.

"That, is the lamest, trick, _ever,_" Draco scoffed. "So you keep Muggle pennies in your gloves, SO what?"

The Weasley brat was the only student who looked remotely impressed, and _she _was looking at Potter.

"How about a bribe?" the newsie proposed to Draco in all seriousness. "These two pennies, in exchange for you never opening your mouth again? You can just teleport food into your stomach if the thought of starving bothers you."

Draco's jaw twisted into a totally disbelieving, contemptuous expression. "I, am _filthy rich_," he informed the newsie acidly. "_What_ would I want your filthy Muggle pennies for?"

"Oh," the newsie said brightly. He dropped the pennies on the stone roof, then added, "Pick them up. It's good luck!" When Draco made absolutely no move to pick the dusty Muggle coins up, the newsie added perkily, "You can't _buy_ good luck you know- well, actually you _can_, but not for as cheap as two pennies!"

"Picking up pennies as a means to give oneself good luck," Granger began in her 'I-know-everything' voice, "is nothing more than a silly superstition, much like tossing salt over your shoulder or knocking on wood."

"Those aren't silly superstitions," the newsie interrupted knowledgeably. "If you knock on wood, and ask, 'Is anyone in there?' and you hear, 'Yes', you're far less likely to be accidentally burgling an occupied home, and that's lucky; and if you toss salt over your shoulder, you're far more likely to dissolve the eye-stalks of the giant slug that's been following you, and that's lucky too; and if you pick up pennies, you're far more likely to duck out of the aim of the sniper who's trying to shoot a hex at you, and that's lucky too!"

Just then, Potter interrupted with the first minisculely intelligent thing Draco bet he'd ever said in his whole life: "Can't you please just tell us what we're doing for remedial astronomy, so we can all go to bed?"

Draco, of course, would've left off the 'please', and added in a 'you imbecilic moron'. The newsie had obviously only kept them after class to insult them. He was the most imbecilic adult Draco had ever had the displeasure of meeting, and that _included_ Dumbledore and 'Professor' Lockhart put together.

"Ah," the newsie said. "Right. All of you, step over there, to those tiles there, right by the edge of the parapets."

"You mean where Professor Sinistra fell?" the Weasley twit half-whispered.

"Don't fret, little bird, there's no sun out!" the newsie informed her brightly.

All four students stared down over the balcony uneasily. Draco could swear he could see a roughly astronomy-teacher-shaped imprint on the ground at the base of the tower. "So what's our assignment?" he sneered. "Finding the_ Little _Dipper?"

"Oh no," the teacher said, with an annoyingly pleasant little laugh. "Nothing so difficult as all _that_. All you little rugrats have to do, is spot the second star to the right."

"Second star to the right of_ what?" _Granger asked.

"You'll know it when you see it," the newsie promised. "Oh yes, three-hundred sixty-two points from Gryffindor house for asking questions in class." "

_"Rugrats?"_ Draco repeated finally.

Ignoring Draco, as he seemed to have this obnoxious habit of doing, the newsie strolled right past him, and tossed something golden over Potter's neck. To which Potter howled inexplicably,

"_I'M NOT MODELING YOUR STUPID GOLD CHAIN NECKLACES!"_

Draco _would've_ sneered back something snide and supremely insulting to that random comment, but instead found himself yapping, "What the DEUCE are you doing?", since the newsie was tossing something over _his_ neck too. Glancing down, Draco saw, horrified, that the _thing_ dangling around his neck was, in fact, a gold chain necklace. Studded in _pearls._

The Weasley brat and Granger probably would've been laughing their filthy little heads off, except at that moment, the newsie was tossing necklaces over their necks too- and the funny thing was- well, apart from the fact that the substitute astronomy teacher was putting necklaces on them- all four necklaces were chained together by a spinny thing and looped through each other. This of course brought Draco into a distastefully close proximity with Potter, Granger, and Weasley.

Draco tried to tear his necklace off, but the newsie simply grabbed the back of it, tugging it tighter like an absurdly fancy noose, and said, "No-no-no, this is a device to position your heads in _precisely_ the right alignment to spot the second star to the right! You have to keep it on!"

Like a show dog in a pearl-studded collar, Draco temporarily stopped struggling, so that the necklace was loosened just enough for him to bark out, "When MY FATHER hear about THIS, he-"

"He'll be wondering where you are..." the newsie said mysteriously, while kneeling down- which was extremely undignified- and slipping a fifth gold chain necklace, which was also attached to the spinny thing- around his own neck.

"What's_ that _supposed to mean?" Draco demanded, feeling a bit unsettled, and thinking, again, of astronomy-teacher-shaped craters.

"It _means_ he'll be wondering _why_ you're still in remedial astronomy, instead of graduating with the other, more _brilliant_ children," the newsie explained.

"On the subject of us more brilliant children-" Potter cut in tentatively.

"Oh, I don't think he was talking about _you,"_ Draco cut in over Potter. "If you've failed to _notice_, Potter, _you're_ being kept after class too."

"Look," Granger sighed to the newsie pleadingly, "Could you possibly please just _tell _us what we're supposed to be looking for?"

"Look for the second star to the left, and then four stars to the right of that, you'll see the star you're to be looking for," the newsie said patiently.

"How'm I supposed to focus on seeing _anything_ when I'm practically rubbing noses with a ruddy _Mudblood?" _Draco growled, glaring into Granger's scowling face, which was precisely three inches away from his own, on account of their 24-karat choke collars.

"Fine then, focus on the ruddy Mudblood," the newsie retorted, finally sounding a bit strained. "Not as fun to stare at as she'll be in ten years, granted, but still- not too shabby."

"Are teachers_ allowed _to say such things about students?" Granger gasped in an incensed tone of disbelief.

All the other students gaped in disgust too- except for some reason, the Weasley girl's gape was directed down towards the groundkeeper's hut, where a cockle of roosters were having a crowing contest.

"I'm a substitute teacher," the newsie retorted, "I can say whatever I like. Like, _Petrificus Totalus_."

Granger went stiff as a flagpole- nothing new for her, actually- and then fell flat on her back- which made Draco, then Potter, then Weasley, topple over like dominoes. So did the newsie, who then, on his elbows, pointed his wand at the remaining three students in turn, and exclaimed: _Petrificus Totalus, Petrificus Totalus, Petrificus Totalus_!" Sighing as he caught his breath, he added, "That'd be_ so_ much more dramatic if I only had to say it _once._ There really _ought _to be a ranged version of that spell..."

Sitting back up on his knees, which tugged all four of the stiff students' necks up an inch, the newsie started twirling the twirly, roughly hourglass-shaped thingy attached to the five necklaces they all wore.

Draco couldn't move his eyes, but he recognized the color and kinkiness of the hair in front of his face, and realized in abject disgust that he'd fallen on top of Granger- and judging by the weight on his knees and the fact that Potter had been standing on his other side, Potter had probably fallen on _him_- which meant that the only student _not _getting crushed was the Weasley girl. Who was probably freaking out in pathetic fangirlish glee to be squashing her idol.

After getting over the initial disgusted shock of learning who he'd fallen onto, Draco realized he _still _felt like he was falling backwards. This was made even weirder by the fact that he'd fallen on his face atop Granger.

Through the pounding in his ears, Draco heard the newsie rattling on about 'questions they should be asking', after he'd only just been docking an outrageous number of points from their house for asking questions! The _nerve._ The newsie was also blabbing about 'revenge' and 'vacuums' and 'pterodactyls', none of which had the _remotest_ thing to do with astronomy. He kept blathering on _forever_ and _ever _about who-the-_deuce _knew what.

Draco wasn't paying much attention, since he was distracted by the far more pressing thought of,_ Ew, ew, Granger's ruddy hair is in my face! Her dead protein fibers are contacting my skin! Ugh! Worst, Astronomy class, ever!_

The flying backwards sensation seemed to go on for_ years_. _Years _of having to listen to the torturous drone of the newsie's irritatingly accented voice, which occasionally went obnoxiously high-pitch as he imitated the students' voices, pretending they were asking him questions.

The imitations were _awful. _Except Potter's. Potter's was okay. In fact, Potter _would_ say something like, 'You'll never get away with this!'. _No, wait... _Potter just _did_ say,

"You'll never get away with this!"

Draco had actually _felt_ Potter's lips moving against the back of his head. Which was freaky, and _repulsive_, since Potter was probably getting spit all through his hair.

Then it hit Draco- and apparently, the same thing hit the other three students, since they all dizzily sprang up to their knees and feet, all accidentally tugging the connected chains around all their necks.

Before they managed to tug the chains off though, the newsie rapidly shouted, _"Petrificus Totalus, Petrificus Totalus, Petrificus Totalus, Petrificus Totalus!"_

And Draco's brief moment of _not_ falling was at an end.

This time, he _actually_ fell on his back. He could feel something disturbingly like a nose under his shoulderblade- it must have been Granger's, since both Potter's and Weasley's noses were pressed together, along with their cheeks. Weasley was probably having _another_ fangirly freakout- Draco could just _imagine_ her writing in her diary once this was all over, something like,

_'OMG! I squashed the famous, perfect, adorable incomparable hottie HARRY POTTER, and he practically kissed me!'_

But this mental image turned his stomach, so Draco quickly tried to think of something else, while stashing the stomach-turning image away to tyrannically tease Potter with later.

Finding something else to think about was easy. He was looming right above Draco, on the left side of his vision, and he was_ still_ twirling his stupid little hourglass thing attached to all their necklaces, and he was _still_ babbling. Only this time, Draco couldn't hear him, since the pounding in his ears had magnified. Draco could, however, read lips, which was something he'd picked up from having to deal with Crabbe and Goyle, who both had the most pathetic speech impediments, inflicted on them by their mothers.

The newsie was saying, quite clearly, "...Bla-di-blah-di-blah, oh, isn't he cute when he was ten, bla-di-blah-di-blah, the sun and moon and stars are making me dizzy, bla-di-blah-di-blah, I don't _believe_ how many kids sneak up to this tower to kiss (he was probably referring to Potter and Weasley here, as best as Draco could guess), bla-di-blah-di-blah, ow, my fingers!, bla-di-blah-di-blah, bother it, just how old _is_ this dashed castle?, bla-di-blah-di-blah, ow, fingers, bla-di-blah-di-blah, oh, my poor fingers, bla-di-blah-di-blah, wonder if I'll have to petrify you rugrats again, bla-di-blah-di-blah, Petrificus Totalus, Petrificus Totalus, Petrificus Totalus, Petrificus Totalus, bla-di-blah-di-blah, hang it, this gets boring, bla-di-blah-di-blah, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, bla-di-blah-di-blah,"

Deciding that the newsie said 'bla-di-blah-di-blah' too much, Draco focused instead on what he could see of the tower behind the newsies head- which was mostly just a rush of galloping color, such as one might see when staring through a prank kaleidoscope. _Good grief, WHY did Granger have to have a nose? _Draco wondered irritably. It did _itch_ so.

After possibly half an hour, the newsie stopped twirling his stupid thing, pulled Draco up by his collar, twisted him around, pointed, and exclaimed, "Oh look, Mini-Malfoy, there are your parents! Fancy that, little Cissy's not even drunk!"

In the direction the newsie was pointing were two very young, very blond people; boy and girl, who had apparently just been kissing. They whirled around in shock towards the newsie, who called out,

"FUNNY, LAST I CHECKED, LOVE POTIONS WERE BANNED IN HOGWARTS! You could get _EXPELLED!_ Oh and you're out of bed after hours! _Naughty. _I mean, you're an attractive young girl, Narcissa, do you really want your children to turn out looking like _him_?"

Draco felt a gloved finger poking his stiff cheek. Then he was dropped roughly face-forward into the pile of petrified children- this time his neck fell on top of Weasley's ankle, Potter's knees were under his torso, and Draco's own ankle had somehow gotten tangled in Granger's hair. Draco was really starting to _loathe _Granger's hair. Did she have to have so ruddy _much _of it?

"Huh, funny, you haven't vanished, Mini-Malfoy," Draco heard the newsie complain. "Pity, I was so hoping you hadn't been born- but I suppose Narcissy ignored my sage advice. And I heard she was _clever._ Misinformation, misinformation. Ah well, there may be other opportunities. No, actually, what are the chances of that? Somehow, I can't see even a ditzy brainless troll being dumb enough to let herself be lured up into a tower to be snogged by Lucius Malfoy _twice."_

The falling backwards sensation returned, and the newsie's highly offensive words again bubbled and blacked out into a pounding, pulseless, noiseless roar in Draco's ears. _What __was__ that? _Draco thought shakily. _What __were__ they?_ They can't have really been his parents, right? It was ridiculous. It had to be a trick, a joke. _A seriously unfunny joke. Maybe he's trapped me in a memory... _Draco speculated uneasily. _Oh GOSH, did this fruitcake substitute teach __honestly__ steal my parents' memories? Oh GOSH, GOSH, can Granger, Potter, and Weasley see my parents memories too?_

That was almost as disturbing as Granger's hair follicles.

But what was the _point_ of it all? It seemed to be an awfully long time to waste on simply sifting and skipping through his parents memories... What, was the newsie looking for some particularly humiliating moment in his parents histories which would ruin Draco's life forever? What could that possibly be? What could _possibly_ be more embarrassing than seeing his parents _kissing _when they were kids? Besides, even if the memories theory _was_ right, why was it taking so blimey _long? _His parents weren't _that _old, and they couldn't have spent their whole_ lives _up on this astronomy tower roof! Bleeding heck, last Draco checked, it was _off-limits_ to students except during Astronomy class!

Draco pondered over this disturbing train of thought, while staring blankly at Weasley's fraying, hand-me-down socks, darned with mismatched yellow-and-orange threads where they had once ripped, and her battered leather hand-me-down and down and down shoes, which were quite obviously _boy's _shoes, and had quite obviously been chewed and salivated on by some toothed animal. They were a disgrace to Pureblood footwear everywhere. They were coming apart at the seams, the soles wouldn't last long- and they were held on in the back with _gum._ Draco could see a bit of Weasley's socked toe poking out of the top corner of the shoe, and the shoelaces looked kinked and slightly moldy.

It was a reprehensible thing to have your nose pressed up against. It was enough to make one miss Granger's hair. _Almost._

Somewhere in the next twelve hours or decades, Draco fell, and fell, and fell, and fell, and fell, and fell asleep.

He dreamed of soap.


	4. That Horrible Sinking Feeling

Disclaimer: I only own Troth and the seagulls. :)

Author's Note: Thank you so much xPPx & patback247 for your highly encouraging reviews!

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><p>=Chapter 4: That Horrible Sinking Feeling...=<p>

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><p>It was the blinking which first clued Hermione off.<p>

Experimentally, she twitched her fingertips the tiniest bit. Nerves moved, muscles responded. She closed her eyes, felt the rise and fall of her chest, listened to her heartbeat. _Yes. Oh yes._ The _Petrificus Totalus_ Body-Bind curse had worn off again. _Brilliant,_ Hermione thought, feeling her excitement escalating.

_Now if only I could warn the others before that nutjob Mr. Troth notices, perhaps we could all draw our wands- well, except Malfoy, and, and-_

The thought of Malfoy reminded her that his ankle was still irritatingly tangled in her hair, tugging it sideways so that it stung, and there wasn't a thing she could do about it without attracting undue attention.

_And for that matter, _she concluded bleakly,_ there isn't a thing I can do about Troth either. I mean, I'm just a second year, and he's the self-proclaimed 'best friend' of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named... I don't stand a chance... well, perhaps if Harry, Ginny and I all try to cast a blinding hex on Troth at once, or Expelliarmus, or petrify him, and then run..._

"Harry," Hermione whispered softly between her teeth, without moving her lips or head, "don't nooth, don't sleak, I hath a tlan." She rapidly realized that she couldn't pronounce the v's, m's, and p's without her lips, so it was a pretty shabby first attempt at ventriloquism.

After a few heartbeats, Hermione realized that the purry, grumbly vibrating sound was Harry snoring. _Oh, only Harry would be asleep at a time like this... whenever this time is,_ Hermione added uneasily to herself.

Finally, she got bored of waiting for Harry to respond to her garbled whispers, so she nudged her elbow lightly into his ribs.

"Hmm- Oh yeah- yeah, I'm awake, Wood! Am I late for Quidditch practice?" Harry yapped out, sitting bolt upright onto his shaky elbows, and blinking dizzily behind his emerald specs.

Hermione cringed. _There goes the plan,_ she thought sourly. Her very next thought was to draw her wand and shout,_ 'Petrificus totalus!'_ at Troth before he had the chance to petrify her again- but she only got as far as_ "Petrif-!"_ before the gold necklace she wore was yanked as tight as a garrote, cutting off her breath.

"Going to charm me, were you, smart-alec girl?" Troth hissed down smugly from above her head. "Charming. Just charming." He whipped out his wand.

Hermione writhed and twisted, gasped like a fish out of water, and desperately tried to wrestle her fingertips under the thin golden stranglecord.

But instead of repeating '_Petrificus Totalus!_' four times over yet again, Troth just chewed on the end of his wand thoughtfully for a moment, then stuck it behind his ear like a pencil. "Now lets see," Troth added, absentmindedly drumming his gloved fingertips one-by-one atop Hermione's head, as he held the gold chains bunched up tight in a fist in his other hand. "Death Valley? Nah, too overdone. The Congo, there's a thought! Nah. Ooh, I have it!"

Seizing the wand back out from behind his ear Troth touched the nib of it to the little pendant all their necklaces were strung through- that strange little trinket of concentric gold rings encircling a tiny hourglass. _"Portus,"_ Troth murmured.

The trinket began to glow a faint, phosphorescent blue- the telltale sign of a Portkey.

The next thing Hermione knew, she felt a lurching in her chest like she was being jolted backwards at the highest bend of a malfunctioning roller coaster. Wind and color pelted her eyes and her mind's eye from all directions, and suddenly-

-she was over her ears in saltwater.

As Hermione resurfaced through the briny, bubbly blueness with the others, she choked, gasped, and rubbed her hair and the water out of her eyes frantically, while also gripping her wand as tightly as she could without actually snapping it.

Through the water clogging her ears, she heard Troth's slightly distorted voice saying,

"Well, this isn't the Bermuda Triangle at all, is it? Botherment. Well kiddies, I _was_ going to take you back to the time of the dinosaurs, Jurassic or Cretaceous period, you know, those eras featuring lots of big teeth and claws and fifty-foot carnivorous reptiles- but, I can't feel my fingers, and it has just dawned on me that I shall still have to get _back_ to the future. So whenever _this_ is shall have to suffice. Adios!"

With a glimmery grin, the drenched Deatheater unclasped the hourglass trinket from everyone's necklaces except his, and then gave the hourglass a twirl.

And just like that, he vanished, leaving four Hogwarts students stranded who-and-when-knew where.

"WHAT, was _that_ all about?" Harry asked shakily.

But as Hermione opened her mouth to answer, it was suddenly filled with swishing water, as her neck was tugged downwards. Forcing her eyes open in the stinging, seaweed-speckled saltwater, Hermione saw that it was Malfoy who was dragging them down by their inter-looped necklaces- he was sinking like a millstone.

Thrusting her arms out in a wide butterfly stroke, Hermione grabbed hold of the blond boy's elbow, and kicked madly to propel herself up. As she neared the glittering, sunlit surface of the water, Malfoy slipped through her hands a bit, till she was just barely holding onto his wrist, and she again hoped her wand wouldn't snap under the pressure.

She resurfaced with a shuddering gasp. "Thanks for helping, Harry," she coughed sarcastically.

"I was trying to keep ahold of my glasses," Harry protested, as he fitted them firmly over his nose again, "and Ron's sister! she was sinking too! Hey, is he breathing?"

Turning her attention back to the blond snob, Hermione realized that his eyes were shut, and his neck lolled limply backwards in the water. "Oh, _criminey,_" she muttered, then in a louder pitch, she asked, "Harry, d'you know the Heimlich?"

"The what?"

"Never mind."

Sticking her wand firmly up her sweater sleeve under her soggy robe, and twisting in her tangled necklace until she could position herself behind Malfoy, Hermione let his limp head drop backwards onto her shoulder, reached her arms down, and clasped her hands tightly together around Malfoy's slender waist, then thrust them hard up under Malfoy's ribs, towards his spine. The first try was a flop, since Hermione's fingers slipped, and she plunged nose-forward into the surf.

"Harry, hold my shoulders!" she ordered, once she had breath enough to order with. After Harry awkwardly grabbed her, she tried the Heimlich maneuver on Malfoy several more times, thinking, _This would be ever so much easier with a chair. Not to mention dry ground._ Finally giving up on the Heimlich, Hermione just one-handedly gripped Malfoy around the chest, and began pounding on his back as hard as she could- which wasn't nearly as hard as she wanted, due to the water's dampening drag.

Abruptly, Malfoy started coughing out frothy mouthfuls of seawater, and thrashing furiously. He looked funny with his hair all crazy- Hermione had never seen it as anything but perfectly _slicked_ back, never a hair out of place. She'd speculated his hair might be held back with magic, but since it washed out in water, it had probably just been a very potent hairgel.

Reaching out and lightly snatching Malfoy's wrist again before he went under again, Hermione asked, "Are you okay?"

"Ugh, the mudblood's touching my skin!" he exclaimed in disoriented disgust, whirling around in the water to glare at her hand on his wrist.

"I just _saved_ your skin!" Hermione retorted hotly.

"I'd_ rather_ drown," Malfoy retorted snidely.

"Fine!" Hermione growled, letting go of him irately.

_"Hermione!"_ Harry exclaimed, but it was too late- they were all being dragged under by their necks again as Malfoy sank.

After some effort, they all resurfaced yet _again_- only this time, Harry was keeping Malfoy's head above-water by a fistful of Malfoy's soggy robe.

"Maybe we'd better ditch these," Harry said practically, wrenching his gold necklace off over his ears with his free hand.

_"Gladly,"_ Malfoy said, viciously yanking off his own pearl-studded chain.

Following suit, Hermione slipped her own gold necklace off over her wet hair, trying not to catch the tiny chain-links, tiny fossilized amber gems, triangular abalone shell chips, and old coins in her tangles. It was quite an attractive piece of jewelry, she saw, now that she actually looked at it- she especially liked the small scorpion trapped in the largest chunk of amber.

Ginny just stared emptily at the three empty necklaces connected to her necklace (which was a plain gold chain with a small gold crucifix), and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she tugged them up out of the water, and looped them all around her own neck. Then she went back to placidly, vacantly backfloating, and staring up wide-eyed at the seafog-riddled, midmorning sky.

"Probably you can use every little ounce of cash you can get, eh Weasley? Malfoy scoffed.

Hermione stared at him in disbelief. "You seriously want to do this? Now?" she scoffed back.

"Course, why _not_ now?" Malfoy retorted, just before a five-foot wave crashed over all their heads.

"Well, for _one_," Hermione coughed primly, sloshing the water out of her eyes with the back of her hand again, "there's that glaringly obvious fact that we don't even know when_ now_ is!"

_"Course_ we do," Malfoy retorted highhandedly, "at least those of us whom can _afford_ calendars. Last night was _Monday_, it's _morning_ now, ergo, it's _Tuesday_."

Groaning in exasperation, Hermione rolled her maple-brown eyes heavenward, and moaned, "Goodness, weren't you even_ listening_ these past seven hours?"

"Why should I have listened?" Malfoy snapped. "Half the time I couldn't hear a thing, and half the time that newsie was jabbering gibberish having not an iota to do with Astronomy, and half the time I was asleep!"

"Oh, honestly, _you_ too?" Hermione moaned. "Oh, and, F.Y.I., nothing can be divided in _half_ three ways," she added tartly.

"What does_ that_ have to do with anything? Malfoy demanded.

"So, what_ did_ happen, Hermione?" Harry interrupted earnestly, looking desperate to know.

Well, she was desperate to tell.

"Alright then," Hermione began, "here it is in summary, and do actually_ listen."_

Malfoy made face at her, and silently mock-mouthed '_and do actually listen_'.

_Really, he's as annoying as Cornish pixies,_ Hermione thought sharply. Taking a shallow, steadying breath as she felt herself unbalancing in the waves, she said, "We have just been stranded in time by Riksamiren Troth, who-"

"Stranded in time for what?" Harry asked, tilting his nose up to keep his glasses from slipping off.

"Not in time_ for_," Hermione explained carefully, "just in _time._ We have been transported backwards in time to an earlier date."

"But that's impossible, right?" Harry interrupted with a nervous little smirk. "I mean, that's just science fiction- like what you see on the telly, right?"

"Harry... you're a _wizard_," Hermione sighed impatiently. "Redefine 'possible'. Be a bit open-minded."

"She means be 'gullible', like her," Malfoy interrupted snootily.

"Now," Hermione continued to Harry, adamantly ignoring the silver-blond Harry was unfortunately keeping from sinking, "the method by which Troth relocated us in the timeline was-"

"Oh _come_ now, he didn't _even!"_ Malfoy interrupted again. "That_ lunatic_ newsie-"

"Riksamiren Troth," Hermione interrupted over him.

"-has trapped us in my parents' memories," Malfoy continued smoothly, totally ignoring her interruption.

"And, _WHY_ would he do that, Malfoy? Hermione sighed. "Why would _anyone_ want to do that?"

"To torment me and humiliate me out of spiteful jealousy, _obviously."_

Hermione gave him a crooked-lipped smile. "This isn't all just about _you_, you know. It's about all of us. Look the thing is, Troth, is from the future- and sort of from the past too- oh, it's like this. Troth claims he was best friends with the Dark Lord,"

_"Voldemort?"_ Harry interrupted in disbelief.

"No, some _other_ Dark Lord," Malfoy sneered sarcastically, "and don't say his name!" he added, giving Harry a wet cuff on the ear.

Harry looked like he wanted to hit Malfoy back, but instead countered goadingly, "What name, _Voldemort?_ Voldemort, Voldemort, _VOLDEMORT!"_

"Shut up!"

"Oh _stop_ it, the two of you!" Hermione snapped. "Voldemort," she said, uncomfortably enunciating the syllables of the unnameable menace, "isn't even born yet."

"Yeah, if you're chump enough to believe some crackpot attention-grubbing newsie," Draco retorted."He _so_ wasn't qualified to teach astronomy..."

"Yes, Malfoy, I think we established that already," Hermione replied dryly. "Where _was_ I even? Oh yes- so anyway, Troth and Voldemort went to Howarts together-"

"Hang on- how?" Harry put in. "Wouldn't Troth be like, seventy? He looked more twenty-ish."

"I was getting to that," Hermione replied patiently. "Troth was a troublemaker and got expelled- I think it had something to do with Voldemort... and, well, after that, they didn't get on for some reason- Troth wasn't very clear on that point, but from what I gather, it had something to do with needles and dolls and girls-"

"Yeah, girls can drive any bloke to psychopathic tendencies," Malfoy interrupted.

"Know a lot of girls then, do you Malfoy?" Harry taunted.

"More than _you_, I bet."

Gritting her teeth, Hermione stated, "And Voldemort-"

"Gettin' awfully comfy with his name, aren't you?" Malfoy scoffed.

"I've been interrupted_ nine_ times since I started explaining!" Hermione exclaimed loudly, starting to lose her temper. "Now _may_ I get a word in edgewise, or shall I leave you all _guessing_ as to why we're up to our necks and noses in seawater?"

"Go on," Harry prompted. "If he talks again, I'll plunge his head underwater."

_"Try_ it, Potter," Malfoy interrupted menacingly, or at least as menacingly as he could with water sloshing up his nose and wet, cobwebby hair plastered all over his ears and glowering eyebrows, and his robe all bunched up at his throat from where Harry was grabbing it, keeping him afloat. "Just _try_-"

Harry grabbed a chunk of Malfoy's pasty-pale hair, and, true to word, plunged his head underwater, then yanked him back up. "Told you," Harry stated evenly.

As Malfoy sputtered and coughed, Hermione cleared her throat of kelp specks. _"Basically,"_ she said, "Troth betrayed Voldemort, Voldemort tried to kill Troth, so Troth went into hiding in some nook where he made time stand still for himself- keeping himself young and cut off from the rest of the time-receptive world- don't ask me how, he didn't say. Finally, Voldemort died, and it was safe for Troth to come out of hiding. But then,_ we_ came into the equation. Apparently, eleven years from now, all four of us will discover Troth's secret lair just as he's about to make his bid for power, on account of the Dark Lord being dead, on account of Harry having killed him-"

"I kill Voldemort?" Harry exclaimed in surprise, forgetting to not interrupt.

"Yes, there'll be some sort of prophecy about it, I think. And _anyways_, since we all end up as Aurors eleven years from now-"

"What's an Auror?" Harry interrupted yet again.

Draco broke out into a grating fit of laughter. "Ha, ha, he, ha, ha! He doesn't know what an Auror is! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, he, ha,"

Harry plunged Malfoy's head under again.

"Well- well now-" Malfoy coughed upon resurfacing, "-now I just_ won't_ tell you what an Auror is, and you can just go on being_ stupid!"_

"Aurors are sort of the wizard police," Hermione sighed. There was still so much about the Wizarding World that Harry was blissfully unaware of... usually, only Ron and her were present when they were explaining common-knowledge type things to Harry, to avoid the embarrassment of dealing with people like, say,_ Malfoy._ "So, being Aurors," she went on, "we'll be trying to arrest Troth and take him to Azkaban- the Wizarding World's most high-security prison," she added cautiously.

"Uh, yeah, Azkaban," Harry replied, sounding miffed and confused.

_"Seriously?"_ Malfoy scoffed.

"Yes,_ Malfoy,"_ Hermione snapped, "haven't _you_ ever heard of Azkaban? I should _think_ you'd be rather _familiar_ with it, seeing as half your relatives call it home!"

"Oh yeah?" Draco sneered, "Well as for _your_ relatives-"

"But- why were we trying to arrest Troth?" Harry asked loudly, quickly intervening. "I mean, yeah, he was Voldemort's chum once, but if he'd been missing all those years, how'd we even know he-"

"He had the mark of a Deatheater," Hermione replied shortly.

Reluctantly, Harry asked, "What's a Deatheater?"

"Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" Malfoy cackled, pointing mockingly at Harry. "He, hee, ha, ha, ha, heh!" The Slytherin twit couldn't have been laughing harder if Harry had hit him with a Rictum Sempra curse. "Ha, ha-he ha, ha ha, heh, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, h-"

The last 'ha' was drowned out as Malfoy's mouth filled with saltwater- since he'd been slowly falling backwards as he pointed and laughed. His robe slipped out of Harry's grip, and he again started sinking like his bones were made of iron.

Irritably, Hermione plunged over and yanked Malfoy back up by his green-striped tie- but she accidentally unbalanced him and he fell too far forwards, banging his head into her shoulder.

Shoving her forcefully away, Malfoy snarled, "Stop, bloody,_ touching_ me, _Mudblood!_ I don't_ care_ if you've got some vulgar salacious girlish fantasy about groping your filthy hands all over me- hands_ off!"_

Hermione smacked his wet tie in his face. "Get _over_ yourself, creep," she hissed. He really was a revolting git sometimes. She felt like vomiting, and not from seasickness either- well, partly from a touch of Portkey-sickness too. She recalled reading in _'Hogwarts, A History'_ that the hysterics and nausea that commonly followed traveling by Portkey was what led to the creation of the Hogwarts Express, as a less troublesome way to reach Hogwarts.

Malfoy's nose went under, and he hastily seized Harry's arm, holding on for dear life.

"Hey, don't drag me under! I think you're cutting off the blood circulation to my fingers," Harry complained. "How d'you _sink_ like that anyway? People generally_ float,"_ he added, glancing at Ginny, who was still silently, vacantly back-floating, with her arms and legs out wide in an X shape, and her eyes on the sky. "You should try it sometime."

"Not that anyone would mind if you _did_ sink," Hermione added cuttingly. But since she couldn't help giving advice, even to jerks; and because Malfoy looked dangerously close to sinking Harry, she added, "Oh _relax,_ Malfoy. _Breathe._ Press your weight onto our shoulderblades. Lift your arms above your head. Trust._ Believe_ you can float. Go on, _try_ it."

_"True_ pureblood witches and wizards sink in water, Granger," Malfoy shot back.

Rolling her eyes again, Hermione countered, "On the contrary, during the witchhunts in the Dark Ages, if someone _floated_ in a trial by water instead of sinking, it meant they were a witch or wizard."

Malfoy snorted. "Shows how much _you_ know. Learned that in some boneheaded superstitious Muggle book, did you? Any_ real_ wizard would sink underwater and then Apparate away, rather than just _floating_ about like a wooden duck."

"Speaking of Apparating," Harry put in, "is that how we got here? Did that Troth guy Apparate us here?"

"No,_ goodness_ no," Hermione replied fervently. "With four students and _his_ level of concentration? He'd have splinched us all for sure!"

"Splinched?" Harry repeated.

Sighing again, and mentally blocking out Malfoy's sniggering, Hermione said, "It's what can happen if you Apparate sloppily. You can get put back together..._ wrong_ when you get to where you're going. It can get... er... messy."

Happily detailing the gory particulars, Malfoy added, "Bones cracked and sticking out at all angles, huge chunks of muscle sliced into badly strung-together slabs, and eyeballs popping out of their sockets or wedged down your throat or or up your ear canals or brain- not that there'd be much to see there, Potter, and, oh yeah, the _best_ part-"

"Alright!" Hermione yapped, "He gets it! We didn't Apparate!"

"Then how_ did_ we get here?" Harry wondered, staring out forlornly at the thrashing waves and walls of dewy seafog surrounding them.

Hermione had been expecting this question a while. "By Portkey," she answered, "which is an item enchanted to transport a person from one place to another upon skin contact- sort of like a touch-based form of Apparating, only it doesn't disassemble and reassemble you the way Apparating does."

"Yeah," Malfoy scoffed, "but every_ intelligent_ person present already_ knew_ that, so who were you addressing? The fishes?"

"So that thing the necklaces were hooked to was a Portkey?" Harry guessed.

"Yes- but you can enchant _anything_ to be a Portkey, Harry," Hermione explained. "That trinket of Troth's was firstly and foremost a Time-Turner."

Harry looked foggy and lost again. "What's a-"

"It allows its wearer, or wearers, in our case," Hermione specified, "to travel forwards or backwards through time,"

"Which is the thing that clocks measure, dear, stupid, ignorant Harry," Malfoy informed in a sickly-sweet, mocking drawl.

"Time-Turners are_ very_ rare, and dangerous, and hush-hush-" Hermione went on,

"Which _means_ you're just making it up," Malfoy concluded haughtily.

"I am _not!_" Hermione snapped.

"Then_ the newsie_ made it up," Draco concluded, shrugging one of his shoulders out of the water a bit. "Come_ on_, Granger, _think,_ what's more believable, that some nutters newsie just came up with some random knowledge to scare some gullible little girl, or that I become an_ Auror_ when I get older, and work with _you?"_

"He's got a point," Harry admitted.

"Well I_ don't_ know if he was telling the truth about _everything!"_ Hermione hissed irritably. "But I've _read_ about Time-Turners- once, in one book, one passage, one mention- and they're _real_. I haven't the slightest notion how Troth got ahold of one, but he_ has_, and this is _bad_- this spells trouble for the entire Wizarding World, for the the entire rest of the world- for the entire space-time continuum! Who _knows_ what Troth might do with it! I mean, he's already twisted history by going back in time and kidnapping and stranding our younger selves for trying to interfere with his dastardly plans- If he disrupts some key events- if he starts mucking about with_ time_, he- he could upset the balance of the entire universe as we know it!"

"So what the deuce were the necklaces about?" Malfoy drawled, in a bored tone, as if the end of the universe were a pretty dull subject, overall.

"I should think that bit was obvious," Hermione replied, trying to calm her frazzled, fretful nerves. "They were for channeling magic- did you know that gold channels time manipulation energy better than any other medium?"

Malfoy yawned widely, somehow managing to not swallow another lungful of ocean. "Fascinating, Granger, fascinating. But _how_, may I inquire, do you know he 'transported us backwards in time', know-it-all? You can't _know_ that! Look around you, for magic's sake! We're in the middle of the ruddy _OCEAN!"_

That last, doomy word rang hollowly in Hermione's ears for a few chill heartbeats. "I wonder," she said finally, staring out at the vast, roiling expanse of water, "how could Troth tell, just by looking, that it's _not_ the Bermuda Triangle?"

"Probably he was bluffing, idiot!" Malfoy yowled. "He hadn't a clue whether it was or wasn't! How do you get better grades than me anyway?"

Smiling back challengingly, Hermione retorted, "Figure it out,_ genius_. And we won't know for _sure_ who's right until we meet somebody here, now will we?"

"Oh, and how do you propose we do _that_, Granger?" Malfoy countered ridiculingly.

Hermione pulled her wand out of her sleeve, and lifted it high up out of the water. Red sparks shot upwards from the wand's tip. "Help me, Harry!" she exclaimed. "It's the universal distress signal amongst wizards and witches!"

"And wizards and witches are_ all_ we want to attract," Malfoy added in a low mutter, as some of the smoldering sparks began to flicker back down, sizzling as they hit the waves, and melting into tiny puddles of ash.

"Good thinking, Hermione," Harry said, pulling his own wand out of his waterlogged robe pocket and sending up his own, less tidy stream of ruby sparks. "The Ministry will figure out we're doing underage magic out of school, and, and then-"

"-And then," Hermione finished impatiently, "they'll just send an owl with a note from the Improper Use Of Magic Office, and pleasantly threaten to expel us if we keep it up."

"Hey, Ron's dad works for the Ministry!" Harry realized. "And_ Ron_ was able to find me when my Uncle Vernon had me locked up in my room, so maybe-"

Hating to crash Harry's hopes, Hermione reminded him, "Ron knew your address, Harry."

"But maybe if the Ministry sends an owl, we could send a note back with it-"

_"If_ we can catch it," Hermione pointed out. "And_ if_ we had paper and ink. And_ if_ owls and underage magic monitors are even in use yet in this age."

"But there is a chance, right?"

"Let's just hope someone sees the sparks," Hermione concluded darkly.

"Oh come _on,"_ Malfoy sneered, _"I_ can barely see them in this beastly fog, and _I'm_ right under them!"

"Want a clearer view?" Hermione threatened, ceasing the sparks and whipping her wand down towards Malfoy's face.

Their eyes met in a locked glare for a full sixty seconds.

Then Hermione held her wand upright again, and said, "C'mon, Harry, lets try Bluebell flames."

As the two jets of blue flames danced upwards, Malfoy commented sarcastically, "Wow, this might actually _work_ if it wasn't _midday_, if there wasn't any_ fog_, if the sky wasn't _blue_, and if we weren't a _billion_ miles from civilization."

"At sea its leagues, not miles," Hermione corrected crisply.

Long, sparkly blue moments followed.

Bird-shaped shadows started wheeling in and out of the fog overhead.

"Oh look, you've attracted seagulls!" Malfoy crooned. "Nice job! We're _saved._ Maybe we can catch one, and put a note on it, do you think?" he mocked. "Seagulls are scavengers, you know. Vultures of the sea. So in other words, we're pretty neatly screwed. We're doomed. We're dead. Just carve the gravestones now. Well, those of us who can _afford_ them. And who actually _have_ parents to mourn us."

"Or parents who_ would_ mourn us," Harry countered acidly.

"Of course my parents would mourn me!" Malfoy protested sharply. "I'm irreplaceable!"

Harry just smirked, looking supremely unconvinced; and Hermione gave Malfoy a pitying look.

"Well, they _would!_"

When Harry and Hermione continued ignoring him, Malfoy started glaring sulkily at their flame-spewing wands. In the background, under his breath, Hermione heard him muttering,

"That stupid newsie stole my wand. I hate him so much. I loathe him. I astronomically despise him. I want to stretch him on a rack by his thumbs and toenails. I want to twist his kneecaps till they snap. I want to make him swallow a gallon of fishhooks. I want to punch his head down his throat and introduce him to his intestines. I want to turn his bones to jelly like Lockhart did to-"

Hermione slapped the crook of her arm down, splashing a spray of water into Malfoy's sour face.

He splashed back at her as best he could without letting go of his glasses-wearing flotation device.

"Careful, Malfoy," Hermione choked out, "I know how to _do_ that deboning trick of Lockhart's."

"Really?" Harry asked, pausing his Bluebell flames to gawk curiously at Hermione. "Since _when?"_

"Since Saturday night, after Professor Lockheart 'fixed' your arm- it was so weird and unusual, I couldn't sleep, so I stayed up stirring the stewing lacewings and cross-referencing some of Madame Pomfrey's books with Lockhart's book _'Gadding with Ghouls'_, where he mentions healing a girl who'd had every bone in her body- including her skull and pelvis- broken by a manic poltergeist, which Lockhart singlehandedly and bravely and expertly exorcised, and- and anyway, I figured out what Lockhart did wrong, and I learned the right way and the wrong way to 'mend' bones. Both ways could come in handy."

"Who'd you practice on?" Harry asked uneasily.

"Spiders, mostly," Hermione admitted. "I know they've got exoskeletons, so it differs a bit from real bones, but I was able to heal them again with a few drops of Skellegrow in scarcely minutes, and anyway, there were just so many of them _around_. Have you noticed there's been an awful lot of spiders scuttling around Hogwarts lately, Harry?"

"You'd really_ debone_ someone, Hermione?" Harry asked, uncomfortably shifting his wand-arm in its socket. "It was _awful."_

"Will you be able to swim, d'you think?" Hermione wondered tentatively, trying to shift the subject off of her infatuation with unorthodox spells.

"It's still a bit stiff, but yeah," Harry replied. "I shouldn't have trouble swimming so long as Malfoy lets go of my arm."

"What, and drown myself?" Malfoy retorted. "Forget it!"

"What are our other options?" Harry wondered. "The Bluebell flames don't seem to be doing much besides pestering the seagulls."

Hermione thought. "Well, perhaps we could use Wingardium Leviosa to propel one of us up above the fog, to see if we can see anything-"

"No,_ Muggles_ might see!" Malfoy argued.

"That'd be good, right?" Harry asked optimistically.

Malfoy shot him a demeaning look. "_Not_ if they ask you, 'Why again were you floating thirty feet in the air?'"

"Hey, Harry," Hermione said, getting another random idea, "d'you still have any of Fred Weasley's Filibuster fireworks in your robe pockets?"

"Fresh out," he answered with a heavy shrug.

With a gleeful, wide-mouthed gape, Malfoy stuck his finger at Harry's face and exclaimed jubilantly, "I _knew_ it was you! I _knew_ it was you who put that firework in that cauldron during Potions Class! _Wait_ till I tell Professor Snape!"

"Oh..." Hermione muttered blackly, remembering about the ingredients she'd stolen from Snape's stores during Harry's distraction, and remembering her unattended cauldron, bubbling away in the future... it would all go to waste, her complex, month-long potion would go to waste- "Oh, and the polyjuice potion was almost ready too!" she moaned aloud. "Just twelve more days- isn't it awful?"

"You were brewing a _polyjuice potion?"_ Malfoy snapped, gaping again.

"You know what it _is?"_ Hermione asked, surprised that he'd know about something she'd researched in Hogwarts' library's Restricted Section.

"Yeah, real dark stuff," Malfoy drawled.

"Look who's talking," Harry retorted.

_"Why_ were you brewing a polyjuice potion, Granger?" Malfoy asked pleasantly, with the slightest hint of a razor edge to his words. "Couldn't stand the sight of your own face anymore?"

"Go ahead, tell him, Hermione," Harry prompted, glaring confrontationally at Malfoy. "Doesn't matter now, does it?"

Hermione took a deep breath, looked Malfoy straight in his icy, kiwi-grey eyes, and stated, "We were going to spy on you. To see if you were the Heir of Slytherin."

Malfoy stared for a stretch, cocked one eyebrow, then the other, then broke out laughing again. Only this time, it was harsher, and came in short barks. "What?" he sniggered, "Me? The Heir of Slytherin? Oh, I_ wish._ Really, I'd _love_ to claim responsibility for trying to clear Hogwarts of all the Muggleborn _filth-"_ he said with relish, "-but it's not me," he added, with a distinctly disappointed shrug.

"Don't you even_ care_ about Filch's cat, you jerk?" Harry hissed. "Or Nearly-Headless Nick? Or about poor Colin Creevey getting petrified?"

"What, the janitor's spy, your ghost friend, and your pathetic little worshiping fanboy?" Malfoy sneered. "Oh, oh let me _think_... no. No, I shouldn't jolly well say so. Hogwarts will be far more decent once the Heir and the Creature of the Chamber have cleared it of all the... _refuse,_" he said, staring directly at Hermione when he said it.

She held her chin high, refusing to let Malfoy crumple her dignity like a piece of parchment.

"_Mudbloods_ will be the first to go, and thats alright with me," he added goadingly.

"Stop calling Hermione that!" Harry snarled, glaring viperously past his wet glasses-lenses at the parasitic Slytherin latched onto his arm. "Take it _back!_ It's foul and dirty!"

"Just like her blood," Malfoy retorted primly.

And then Harry lost it. He jammed his wand back in his pocket, grabbed Malfoy's shirt collar, and then, in a fluid arc, he socked Malfoy in the jaw with a wet fist.

"THAT'S_ IT!"_ Malfoy yowled, swiping the trickle of blood off his split lip, ripping Harry's clutched fingers off his collar, and floundering wildly. "I've _had_ it with you losers!"

He attempted to swim off in a huff, and made it about three feet before going under.

Hermione swapped a glance with Harry. "_Should_ we?" she sighed plaintively.

"I _suppose_ we_ should_..." Harry muttered reluctantly.

"Yes... probably..."

"Do we_ have_ to?"

"Rooster," Ginny commented unhelpfully.


	5. Washed Up

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry, Hermione, Draco, or Ginny. I am simply borrowing them, and stashing them in a certain seafaring fantasy world I_ also_ do not happen to own. Whether I put them back where they belong afterwards is another matter entirely...

Claimer: Captain Wentmark and his 'welcoming' crew are figments of my own imagination.

* * *

><p>=Chapter 5: Washed Up=<p>

* * *

><p>The song had been stuck in Will's head for the past four hours. He knew the only way to get it out of that dark, muddled place was to sing it, but he dared not. Not after only<em> just<em> convincing his fellow seamen that his throat was too sore and raspy to manage anything beyond a whisper- not at all fit for singing.

That was the excuse. Tidy, feasible. It was the first fib Will had told since his mother was- since she passed away. _Pretty foolish thing to fib about,_ he thought stiffly, as he pulled himself up to the next toehold on the ratlines, gripping the ropes harder than usual, on account of his sudsy hands.

Spanish Ladies. That was the halyard shanty the men had requested this morning. _And_ the song they'd requested as the forebitter last evening. A grand total of _six_ times. Perhaps that was why the never-ending, rhymey,_ 'farewell and adieu'_ tune was stuck in Will's head now- or perhaps that was just cosmic punishment.

Plucking one of the two wooden clothespins out from between his teeth, Will pinned the left sleeve of the blue-checkered sailor's shirt to the ratlines directly in front of him. But as he reached for the second pin, the wind picked up, slapping the dripping shirt into Will's face, dislodging the pin from Will's clenched teeth, and sending it tumbling.

Shoving the shirt out of his face, Will's eyes sprang down to the deck, where the clothespin was rolling to-and-fro between two hefty clothes-baskets, mimicking the ship's sway.

But something else caught Will's eye in the late-day sunlight, just over the ship's rail, lolling into and out of his line of sight. At first glance, it looked like a black coat floating in the water. _It must have fallen off the line..._ Will figured. Abandoning the half-pinned shirt, he monkeyed down the ratlines, jumped the final three rope-steps, and hit the deck lightly on one bare foot and one scraped knee. Springing back up, Will hurried over to the rail, stubbing his toe on the clothespin in his haste, and took a second look overboard. There was something pale lodged in the folds of the black, bobbing coat, and as the waves tumbled it over, Will saw an elbow and half a face, and realized it was a boy.

"Man overboard- uh, BOY OVERBOARD!" Will called out desperately to the empty deck of the _Avalon,_ looking around frantically for a loose line or anything else he could throw down to rescue the boy.

"Sore throat indeed," Will heard a leather voice cackle. "Ya don't look overboard to me."

"Not me,_ him!_" Will said urgently, pointing overboard. "And my throat's feeling much better now, thanks."

"Jolly good, sing Mariner's Revenge, shantyboy," Mr. Dagge joked with a straight face, crossing his arms in front of his wrinkled shirt.

"But he's _drowning!"_ Will protested, turning away from the ornery sailor to start rapidly unwinding a rope from its belaying pins.

Dagge looked unconcerned, sarcastic even. "Ever heerd the story of the boy what called wolf, lad?" he asked.

"But he's_ right_ there!" Will exclaimed desperately. "Drowning!"

"The tale starts with this ickle-bitty sheperd boy, much like yerself- Hoy!" Dagge yapped, as Will started tying the rope around his own small waist, "Now see here, what be ya doin', you dunderheaded urchin?"

"I'm going to save him, if you won't," Will retorted, jumping over the rail- only to be jerked back by the waist halfway down. He scrambled madly, trying to slip out of the rope, as the sailor hoisted him back up.

"Where's yer head, boy? Ya tryin to keelhaul yerself? Folks get drownded thataway."

"But he's going to get plowed under by the keel, and then he'll be killed for certain!" Will gasped out, squirming in Dagge's grip, and trying to loosen the tight rope constricting his waist.

The sailor glanced lazily over the rail. "Looks fer certain dead ta me anyhow," he drawled. "Besides, ever pondered mebbe somefolks had a _reason_ ta throw him overboard? Just get a gander of that black shroud. Prolly a plague carrier. And look at that pasty pale leprous skin! Looks to be a vampire whelp, I'd reckon."

"You can't just_ assume_ someone's a minion of the Devil just because they're pale," Will snapped back.

"He's_ floatin',_ ain't he?"

"That doesn't mean a thing, except that he _might_ still be alive!" Will hissed. "We _have_ to save him, it's the only Christian thing to do!"

"I'm atheist."

"Figures," Will muttered. Filching the pocketknife from Dagge's trouser pocket, Will hastily cut himself free from the rope binding his waist, nicking his skin in his hurry, and the second he was loose, he jumped over the rail.

When he resurfaced from his badly thought-out dive, Will could hear Mr. Dagge echoing his earlier call of, "BOY OVERBOARD!", except with a few colorful, impolite adjectives thrown in.

Ignoring the cussing sailor, Will seized the exceedingly drowned-looking boy by his arm, flipping him over so that he was face-up again. Then, hoisting the limp kid over his shoulder, and trying his best to keep both their heads abovewater, Will dropped the knife, and one-handedly paddled hard away from the churning white wake near the ship's keel.

Gasping through the splashing water, and fighting against the undertow dragging at his ankles, Will howled out, "Help!", realizing, a bit too late, that he'd knifed his only means of getting back on the ship.

_"Help!"_ he heard echoed.

"Help?" Will repeated, wondering why his voice would _echo_ in the middle of the ocean, and _why_ his echo sounded so... _girly._

"Malfoy?" the echo said faintly, and Will was pretty sure he hadn't said _that._ "Harry, he's this way, I heard him!"

"Who's... there?" Will called out tentatively.

"Who do you _think?_" a boy's voice called back sarcastically.

Honestly, Will didn't know _what_ to think. But just as he was about to reply, a thick hemp rope was flung half-onto his head and shoulder.

"William!" a stern voice from up on the ship commanded. "Loop the rope round your waist, lad, and we'll hoist you up here spiffy." It sounded like First Mate Phillip- you could always count on Phillip to keep on top of any situation that needed being kept on top of.

Shrugging off the heavy rope, Will tied it securely around the pale lad's waist instead, and then gripped the rope firmly, and called back, "Alright, ready!"

"Ready for_ what?"_ the sarcastic, faraway, mystery boy's voice- presumably Harry- asked impatiently, sounding closer than before.

Will squinted hard through the curling seafog, trying in vain to pick out any solid shapes. "Just keep calling, we'll save you!" he assured the voices in the mist.

"Who's _we?"_ Harry asked warily, as Will and the pale boy were tugged backwards toward the ship. "Malfoy, is that even you?"

"Are you from the Ministry of Magic?" the girlish voice put in excitably.

_I must have simply heard that wrong, on account of the water in my ears,_ Will reasoned dizzily. But he didn't have the time or concentration to answer, as he and the pale boy were dragged up over the guardrail, onto the solid wooden deck of the _Avalon._

"Where'd_ that_ come from?" exclaimed one of the sailors who'd pulled them up, as he gawked at the wraithishly pale drowning victim.

Ignoring the rest of the surprised, edgy comments of the crew, Will staggered rapidly across the deck, spotted an empty barrel, tipped it on it's side, and rolled it back toward the unconscious boy.

The rest of the sailors watched on in confused fascination, as Will draped the drowned boy chest-first over the barrel, and started rolling it back-and-forth, pounding on the boy's back. It was an old trick Will had learned from an Amsterdam sailor, who'd saved _him_ from drowning once.

After about a minute of this rolling and bashing, the boy started choking, and coughing out copious amounts of seawater. Coming to at last, he staggered upright, took one dizzy, swaying look at Will, and sneered, "You look like a _Muggle."_

Grinning back, Will said, "You're alive! He's _alive!"_ Turning to Mr. Dagge, he added, _"See,_ he's _alive."_

"Don't mean he won' drop dead any minute now from the plague," Dagge snorted.

"He's a _plague_ carrier?" the sickly young navigator, Thomas Tallowick, asked nervously, lifting his shirt-cuff up to cover his mouth. "You're most dreadfully certain, are you?"

"_Any_ minute now," Dagge repeated, plucking the silver-chained pocketwatch out of Tallowick's vest pocket, and peering pointedly at it.

"You _all_ look like Muggles!" the blond sneered, writhing the tight coil of rope off his waist and down his legs, kicking it away from him, and darting his eyes around in a hunted way, as though he thought all the sailors were a herd of muddy rhinos which would charge him any instant.

"Throw him back overboard!" roared another sailor who's name Will forgot- Norman, or Norris, or something.

Jumping defensively in front of the new boy, Will protested fervently, "He's not, he's not, really he's not- he's no more a plague carrier than I!"

"Tha's right,_ he's_ been in contact with the plague carrier!" Norman (or Norris) concluded importantly. "Plague's contagious, isn' it? Tha's why it's called plague! Throw _both_ the brats overboard! But don't touch 'em- Smack 'em off with an oar or somefin!"

"What's this about throwing my cabin boy overboard?" came the calm, orderly voice of the captain. "And Norman, kindly drop that oar."

Will breathed a short gasp of relief, glad to have another level head on deck.

"Young William there fished up a plague carrier, sir," Phillip informed him blandly. "Or so I'm told."

"It's not true, Captain," Will protested desperately, "he's just a boy who was drowning and- and there's at least two more down there- I suspect they're the victims of shipwreck-"

"No, we were_ Portkeyed,"_ coughed the wet, furiously scowling blond, tucking his crossed arms tightly around his ribcage.

"There are no ports, not within leagues of here," Will informed the nettled boy patiently, "we're in the middle of the Atlantic."

"Maybe the lad was keelhauled?" one of the sailors behind Will guessed.

Turning back to his First Mate, Captain Wentmark said, "Phillip, do take a longboat and some men and search for survivors. If there are any, we must fish them up presently. Steady there, William," the captain added, snatching Will by the shoulder as he tagged after Phillip, eager to join the rescue party.

"But I want to help," Will protested.

"And so you shall. See to the new boy, lad, get him cleaned up and dried off and settled, won't you."

"Yes sir," Will replied dutifully, as Wentmark paced distractedly away.

"I'm cleaner than any of you filthy Muggle scum could ever _dream_ of being!" the pale boy called out nastily.

"He's just swallowed too much seawater, he's not thinking clearly!" Will quickly and loudly apologized to anyone nearby who'd heard that.

"I'm thinking as crystal-clearly as cut diamonds, not that you'd have ever seen any of those, _Muggle boy,"_ the boy snapped back.

Trying to look as friendly and non-threatening as possible, Will took several steps closer to the newcomer, until he was within handshaking distance. "Look, I know you must be scared," Will began soothingly, "and you must be worried about your friends-"

"I don't _have_ friends," the boy cut in snidely, "I have _acquaintances,_ and they- well, they're at the bottom of the moving staircases, aren't they? And I don't see why I should be worried about _them,_ seeing as _they_ weren't kidnapped by a deranged newsie pretending to be an astronomy teacher, and_ they_ weren't subjected to the humiliation of being trapped in my parents' memories, and_ they_ weren't dumped in the middle of the bloody beastly Muggle-infested _ocean._ And get away, you'll contaminate me!"

"I'm no more a plague carrier than you," Will argued exasperatedly.

"I _said_ get _away!_" the blond snarled, sharply shoving Will in the chest, and in the process, unbalancing himself-

-Will quickly caught the boy by the front of his odd black robe, just in time to keep him from falling backwards over the rail, and pulled him hard back towards his chest. They both tumbled safely onto the deck.

Before Will could breath a sigh of relief or say, 'that was close', the blond boy punched him in the shoulder, then the ribs.

_"Ow!_ What are you hitting me for?" Will demanded, rolling out of the way of a third blow.

"You started it," the blond snapped back.

"I was under the impression I just saved your life!_ Twice!"_

"Well, aren't you delusional."

"I just _saved_ your _life,"_ Will repeated slowly, still reeling slightly from the unexpected blows.

"What, by smashing my spine in, and trying to knock me off the ruddy boat, and shoving me down onto this ghastly splintery floor?"

"I think we've got off on the wrong foot here," Will said with forced pleasantry, getting to his feet, and offering the blond a hand up. "My name's Will Turner."

_"Like,_ I care?" the boy scoffed, eying Will's hand as though it were slimy, diseased, and crawling with maggots.

"My name's Will Turner," Will said again, the forced smile straining painfully at his face. _Maybe somebody did throw this twit overboard for a reason..._ "And you are?" Will added congenially.

_"Seriously_ late for transfiguration class."

Remembering what the voices in the mist had said, Will asked, "Is your name Malfoy?"

"Lucky guess," Malfoy spat back. But suddenly, his whole face changed, and looking at Will with the first trace of interest, he asked, "Hey wait, that couldn't _possibly_ have been a lucky guess- hey, are you a wizard?"

"No," Will shot back instantly, and perhaps a bit too defensively; subconsciously looking away, and rubbing his punched shoulder.

"Oh," Malfoy drawled, going back to haughtily ignoring Will, and staring critically around the cluttered deck. "I'd bet ten week's allowance that this clunker can't _even_ fly," Malfoy scoffed lazily.

"Is there anything I can do for you?" Will asked politely, trying to pretend he hadn't just heard that.

"Yes, you can hurl yourself overboard, and rid the world of another useless, worthless, filthy Muggle."

"Look," Will said, swallowing his nagging irritation, "I'm going to find us both something dry to wear, so just stay here, and don't fall overboard." Will started off up the stairs to the forecastle, and in through the door to the unlit Great Cabin, but a moment later, he hurried back down, and added, "Actually, better just come with."

"What, afraid of the dark?" Malfoy mocked. "Ow, let _go_ of me, Muggle!" he growled, as Will snatched his wrist, and tugged him along up the stairs.

Trying to ignore the fact that the glowering, disagreeable blond was purposefully digging his perfectly trimmed nails into his forearm, Will led the twit to his quarters, which was basically a large broom closet adjoining Captain Wentmark's spacious cabin.

"You live in a _closet?"_ Malfoy scoffed, crossing his arms again. "What _are_ you, a House Elf?"

Ignoring him, Will struck a match, lit the lantern hanging on a hook near his hammock, untied the drawstring to a small satchel containing the precious few items he owned, and fished out his only other pair of clothes, the nice ones. "These should fit you, you look about my size," Will estimated, holding the outfit out to Malfoy.

"Oh I am so _not_ your size, you puny, runty, diseased, malnourished, little insolent scrap of Muggle skin and bones-"

But the astronomically irritating blond's insults were cut off by the First Mate's voice ringing out on deck, saying- "Got 'em Captain, safe and sound! We couldn't find any but these youngsters. And no trace of a ship, either... and as a matter of fact, no wreckage. Odd, really."

Glad for an excuse to leave, Will tossed his neatly folded Sunday clothes at Malfoy, and said, "The door doesn't align right with the doorframe, but it'll stay shut if you shove that bit of broken anchor fluke in front of it. I assume you know how to dress yourself." With that, Will promptly dashed through the captain's cabin, and back out on deck, to see if there were any more _agreeable_ children his age amongst the survivors.

Halfway down the stairs to the quarterdeck, Will caught sight of the returning sailors clambering out of their jollyboats and onto the ship. Among them, looking fairly lost, was a short boy with wet black bangs drooping over beetle-green spectacles. He wasn't crossing his arms and glaring and calling everybody 'Muggles', anyway, so that was a good sign.

Will started practically bouncing down the stairs again, excited to meet this new possible friend.

But he stopped rigid when he saw the girl. Will had never seen a wetter, prettier lass. She looked like a Naiad, she looked like a nymph, she looked like a pixie, she looked delicate, with a pert little nose, and much too short a skirt, and- she looked up.

Will's breath caught in his throat as he ducked back behind the stair-rails. It occurred to him that he'd never actually _met_ a girl his age. He'd only ever _watched_ them, from a safe distance.

"Ahoy, William, come on down, lad!" Captain Wentmark called up to him.

Trying to preserve his dignity and pretend he _hadn't_ been hiding behind balustrade-bars, Will stood mechanically, and obediently walked down the stairs, towards the young castaways.

"William, I'm putting these three hapless victims of mischance in your charge, along with that other boy," the captain told him in his perfectly businesslike voice.

"Aye, sir," Will responded, and it was only now that the captain mentioned it, that he noticed the third child, a dainty, blank-faced ginger girl, hovering behind the boy in the green glasses.

"But_ supposin'_ they're _all_ plague carriers..." Dagge growled ominously.

"The Black Plague, you mean?" trilled the pixie girl, turning to face Dagge with a winning smile. "Oh, never fear, if we had _that,_ you'd know it, it would be _horrid-_ we'd be covered head-to-toe with black boils on our neck, under our arms, or on our thighs- and they'd be split open, and oozing pus and blood, and possibly the size of an orange- and we'd be feverish, or with chills, or coughing, or vomiting, or nauseous, or sweating, or coughing up blood; and we'd have gangrene of the fingers, toes, lips and nose- making them black, the plague's namesake, _not_ pretty; and we'd _definitely_ be bleeding out of the ears- that starts within twelve hours of infection, so, _obviously,_ unless we caught the plague earlier _today,_ we _don't_ have it- oh- and we'd smell revolting. And _besides_ all that, the last significant European outbreak of bubonic plague was the Great Plague of Marseille in 1720, so obviously we-,"

"Seventeen-twenty?" the ever-squinting lookout, Ollie Shingleton, interrupted skeptically as he shuffled by. "As in, the_ year_ seventeen-twenty? As in, a whole _score and three years_ from now?"

The girl blinked, glanced around more carefully at the ship and sailors, cleared her throat, then said slowly, while rolling her eyes up to the left as if trying to recall something, "I did, of course, _mean_ to say- the Great Plague of _Vienna,_ 1679, which occurred roughly a score of years ago- since of course, it is, currently, the year 1697."

"Really?" the boy in the green spectacles asked.

"If you ask _me,_" the pixie girl swiftly and stiffly added, ignoring the boy, "the medieval Black Plague was _really_ all the fault of whoever killed the cats. See, if people hadn't been _so_ superstitious and thought cats were evil, and slaughtered them mercilessly, then the _cats_ would've killed the _rats_, and the rat_ fleas_ wouldn't have spread so disastrously."

"You seem ta know an unhealthy deal about Plague, little missy," Thomas Tallowick mumbled uneasily.

She shrugged, making her wet hair spiral in strange and interesting ways on her tiny, black-robed shoulders, and said simply, "I read a lot."

"You _read?"_ Dagge repeated derisively.

"Excuse me," the pixie girl said with strained decorum, and a mildly miffed waver to her voice, "is the first boy you rescued alright?"

"He's breathing," Will replied tactfully, since he hadn't found out yet whether Malfoy had any injuries, so he might not be alright in body, and he certainly wasn't 'alright' in the head. House Elves and flying ships, and all that rot.

"William, my boy," Captain Wentmark directed sensibly, "do take these very wet children and clothe them."

"Sir?" Will put in hesitantly, "I um- just hung up the wash- it won't be dry for at least a half-hour yet."

"Quite, quite, and besides, it's all too large, isn't it?" Wentmark concluded. "Follow me, children."

Will tagged after, wondering if the captain was really going to lend some of his own clothing to possibly-plague-ridden children he'd never met. As his captain and the newcomers stepped foot on the stairs, Will raced up past them, to open the Great Cabin's door. He gripped the handle snugly in his jittery hand, holding the door ajar, and waiting respectfully for the others to go through first.

The pixie girl stepped so close to him as she walked by that she almost touched him, and when she suddenly turned to him and said, "Why thank you, that's ever-so-gentlemanly of you," it took all of Will's concentration to nod and smile back.

The first thing Will noticed as he followed the others into the dark cabin interior, was that the door to his room was still ajar.

As Wentmark made his way to the back of his cabin, toward the stern windows, he called back over his shoulder, "Fetch their half-drowned friend, would you William?"

"Aye sir," Will replied dutifully.

_"'Friend'_ is a stretch," the bespectacled boy muttered, as Will brushed past him.

As suspected, Malfoy was still standing in Will's boxy little room, in exactly the same spot, exactly the same position, exactly the same expression of indignant snobbery. He hadn't changed yet. In fact, the only thing that_ had_ changed was the puddle of ocean saltwater around Malfoy's shiny black shoes, which was a tiny bit wider, due to the water trickling from his pale hair, down his neck, to his elbows, to his wrists, to his knees, to his socks, to his shoelaces, to the floorboards.

"Right where I left you," Will commented dryly. Glancing at the puddle, he added, "I presume you know how to mop."

Malfoy arched a single eyebrow, without moving any other muscle in his face, then shot back acidly, _"Why_ would I know how to mop?"

"Sorry, evidently I shouldn't have assumed you know anything," Will replied nicely, expertly masking his sarcasm. "I'm here to fetch you."

_"Fetch_ me?" Malfoy repeated indignantly.

"Oh, sorry again, I assumed you_ knew_ what fetching was," Will said in the same infinitely nice tone. "Allow me to demonstrate."

Grabbing one of Malfoy's folded elbows, Will snatched up his neatly-folded pile of unwanted Sunday clothes with his other arm, and exited his room again, with difficulty. Malfoy's shoes squeaked and skidded across the smoothly sanded woodwork all the way out, but at least he wasn't nailing him this time.

Two steps out of Will's room, Malfoy viciously twisted his arm backwards out of Will grip, then warned him in a murderous hiss, "Touch me again, Muggle, and I WILL steal Potter's wand, turn you into a slug, and _step_ on you."

"My wand wouldn't work for you, Malfoy," Harry shot back smugly. From which Will guessed that Harry's last name was Potter.

_"Fine,_" Malfoy snapped sharply, "touch me again, Muggle, and I WILL steal Potter's wand, and _ram it down your throat."_

"When you say, wand," Will began hesitantly, "are you referring to a music conductor's wand, or a lacrosse stick?"

"Yes," the pixie-faced girl put in swiftly. "Malfoy meant conductor's wand. His father was a music conductor."

"He was not!" Malfoy retorted indignantly.

"But he wasn't _much_ of a music conductor," the girl went on quickly. "He conducted music very poorly, which is why Malfoy is ashamed to speak of him."

"I am not!" Malfoy retorted, even more indignantly.

"And yes, Malfoy plays lacrosse."

"I do not!"

"But not very well."

"I do not!"

"Yes, you do_ not,"_ the pixie girl agreed smugly.

"Over here children, if you please," Captain Wentmark called over from the aft of the cabin, where he was kneeling beside a painted, palm-wood sea-chest. He clicked open the curlicued brass clasps, and lifted the lid.

Coming closer, Will saw that the chest contained an odd assortment of nicknacks. There was a small wooden model of Da Vinci's flying machine, a brass telescope, a collection of shells of all types, sizes and colors strung on a length of twine, a pack of playing cards, and a knife with a carved scrimshaw handle, etched with an amateur depiction of a dragon attacking a ship.

Wentmark carefully pushed aside these trinkets, revealing the stack of folded clothes underneath. "These were my son's," he said softly, running his fingertips over the small, closely-spaced brass buttons of a very fine, patterned vest with vine motif.

"These were your _son's?"_ Malfoy repeated skeptically, staring snidely at the pretty fabrics.

"I didn't know you had a son," Will said curiously.

"I don't."

"Oh. _oh,"_ Will replied, and suddenly he felt wretchedly stupid, and incomprehensibly sorry for his captain.

"Anyway," Wentmark went on casually, although Will could see his throat tightening under his cravat, "these should fit you three lads, you'd be about his age, in another year or twain."

"My clothes are just fine sir- I'm practically dry already-" Will protested, not wanting to accept so generous an offer- not to mention he was scared to death he'd get the clothes dirty, or tear the embroidery.

"William, I insist," Wentmark interrupted kindly, pushing a folded outfit into Will's hands- a teal tafetta shirt with bead-tipped ties, a tan velveteen vest with fancy black frogging and embroidery, and black knee breeches. Will accepted the old, fancy clothes silently.

Next, Wentmark handed Malfoy the patterned vest- it was long, red damask, festooned with brass buttons, and came with a pair of dark bronze breeches, also buttoned, and a lemon-and-white pinstriped shirt. Malfoy scowled distastefully at the clothes, and Will silently vowed that if he said _one_ rude word about them, he'd sock him in the jaw.

Gently rustling through a few more precious keepsakes, Wentmark pulled another fine outfit out of the chest and handed it to Harry. It was a green-and-tan, brocade frock coat, with pale, minty, silk satin lining, silver hasps, and scalloped cuffs. The embroidery was of gold purl, metal sequins and floral ribbon, and slightly weathered and stained. There were matching knee breeches, and a dove-grey shirt with tiny blue pearl buttons. Harry took the clothes respectfully, peering sadly through his glasses at Wentmark.

"As for the ladies," Wentmark went on, as he closed the chest, "the bitty little amber-haired moppet there can wear your Sunday spares William, those are the only things small enough. And this lass here, with the clever eyes, can wear one of my shirts, and this vest here, as sort of a dress."

Wentmark handed the pixie girl a frilled, white linen shirt with ties, and a faded, peacock-blue vest, with lavender stitching in the seams, and lots of small straps and buckles in front.

Will handed the redhead girl his Sunday clothes- a white shirt, a plain black vest with a plain brass buckle in back, and dark tan knee breeches. He had to push them into her hands four times before her little fingers actually gripped onto them, and Will began to wonder if there was something somehow... _wrong_ about her.

Wentmark scratched his wig contemplatively, then said, "I'm afraid there's only two pairs of shoes..."

"I'm fine without," Will said quickly. He didn't actually own a pair of shoes, and preferred to not wear them anyways.

"Me too," the pixie girl chimed in, "I'm fine. The floorboards are actually very nice."

Will was suddenly oddly glad he'd spent all of last Monday sanding and polishing the floor of Wentmark's cabin.

After taking one of the two pairs of buckled shoes, Malfoy pursed his lips irritably, shot an envious glance at Harry's greenish outfit, and held up the reddish one, saying, "Wanna swap?"

Both boys tossed the folded outfits to each other, then entered Will's room to change. Will followed, kicked the bit of anchor fluke in front of the door, and then started stripping off his black vest, tan shirt, and dark grey breeches, and pulled on his new, fancy, dry clothes over his damp white drawers. The other two boys changed in embarrassed silence, with their backs turned to each other, and Will got the impression that they weren't used to changing in front of other people. Obviously, they weren't used to living on ships either.

Will tied the last of the beaded ties on his teal shirt, put his wet clothes in a small pile in the corner of his room, and left the richly embroidered tan vest on his hammock. It really was just _too_ nice to wear.

Glancing over his shoulder, Will saw that Malfoy hadn't bothered to take off his wet, green-and-yellow striped necktie. He was also having trouble securing all the little hooks and eyes of his coat's hasps.

"Need some help?" Will asked.

_"No,"_ Malfoy snapped back, "I just can't figure out who would put _fishhooks_ on a coat, or who would wear a _coat_ in this climate."

"Maybe the same sort of person who would wear a _black robe_ in this climate?" Will countered.

"Shut up, Muggle."

As soon as the other two boys were decently dressed, Will opened his door and stepped out- right in front of the pixie girl.

"Oh, I haven't even told you my name, have I?" she said apologetically. "I'm Hermione Granger, and this is Ginny Weasley. And he's Harry Potter, and of course," she added, glancing disapprovingly behind Will, "you've met Draco Malfoy. Goodness, you look funny in those clothes. Oh, I was talking to them- you look quite nice."

"I'm Will," Will said. "A pleasure to meet you all, welcome aboard the _Avalon,"_ he added quickly, desperate to be polite.

"Hullo, Will," Harry said from behind him.

"Is it true that you're the one who spotted us?" Hermione asked.

Will nodded nervously, wondering which one of the sailors had told her. Probably Phillip.

"We owe your our_ lives,_ Will." Hermione stepped up close to him, sopping wet and brimming with gratitude, and for a moment, Will was terrified that she might actually throw her arms around his neck and hug him. "Thank you-" she breathed, "-oh gosh,_ thank_ you."

Will forced an embarrassed smile, and nodded again. Smiling and nodding, that was the easiest response.

"Oh, stop _gushing,_ would you Granger?" Malfoy sneered from behind Will.

"I'm only being polite," Hermione retorted defensively, glaring over Will's shoulder into his room.

"You're only being _nauseating,_ as _usual,"_ Malfoy corrected.

"Cut it out, Malfoy," Harry snapped. "Just cut it_ out."_

"William," Wentmark prompted, "do fetch us up some mugs of hot cocoa while the lasses are drying and dressing, won't you."

"Aye sir," Will said, maneuvering around the irritated girl, and then racing off. Will hurried out the cabin and down the stairs, jumping the rail for the last three steps, dashed across the deck, and into the galley.

On the stove counter, Dempsey Prynn, the sea cook, was already brewing the hot cocoa- and had, in fact, been preparing it from the moment Malfoy had first been fished up, since Wentmark had asked him to. Wentmark was considerate like that.

After helping Dempsey to arrange the pewter mugs on a tray, pour the hot cocoa, and top each mug with a few chips of muscavado sugar, Will took the tray, and returned to Wentmark's cabin, careful to lean with the sway of the ship underfoot, to keep the cocoa from spilling.

When Will came through the cabin door, Malfoy was lingering beside the doorway, with his back against a wall. He was peering at Wentmark across the cabin, and saying, under his breath, to Harry, "Isn't it dreadful how they look so much like us? How you can never really _tell,_ from a distance? I mean, why can't they have spines or frills on their ears, or dog noses, or a great big 'M' branded on their foreheads, so that you can tell them apart from decent folk at a glance?"

At that same moment, Hermione and Ginny came out of Will's room, wearing their new clothes. Hermione was carrying all of the wet black robes, socks, sweaters, skirts, and Will's wet clothes, at arm's length, trying to keep them from soaking her new, dry, oversized shirt.

"You've_ really_ never met a Muggle before now, have you?" Hermione asked Draco in bemusement, from behind the pile of wet laundry.

"And if it were up to _me,"_ Malfoy went on to Harry, snidely ignoring Hermione, "I'd say we should brand a 'MB' into the foreheads of all _Mudbloods."_

"Oh _shut_ up," Harry snapped, and Hermione shot Malfoy a glower, rushed up in front of him, and whispered sharply,

"Watch your mouth!"

"I _can't,_ it's all the way down under my nose," Malfoy drawled. "But I'm sure you could watch _your_ mouth without even trying- it's certainly_ big_ enough."

"I_ meant_ keep _quiet_ about- you_ know-"_ Hermione went on, dropping her voice to a lower whisper, "terms that would be- _out of place,_ in this place. And time."

_"You_ said 'Muggle' too," Malfoy reminded her smugly.

"Cocoa?" Will asked, holding up the plate and making his presence known.

Hermione blinked at Will in surprise, obviously flustered that he'd overheard her words.

"Ah yes, William," Wentmark said from across the room, where he'd been lingering over an old book, while waiting for the children to change. "Just set it down here on the table, won't you."

Will obeyed, quickly.

"Now, come along, and have some cocoa, why not, and tell me all about your adventure, or tragedy, or twist of fate that landed you poor souls stranded a-sea," Wentmark said, beckoning the children over to the table, and pulling out seats.

"Er- where do you want me to put the wet clothes?" Hermione asked Will awkwardly, as the other children filed over to the table.

"Oh-" Will replied quickly. Racing out of the cabin again, down the stairs, and across the deck, he grabbed the basket of clothes he'd been hanging up earlier, ran back up stairs, in through the cabin door, in front of Hermione, and said breathlessly, "-here. Just leave them in here, I'll hang them to dry for you."

"Let me help you-" Hermione began, as she dumped the wet clothes in the clothesbasket.

"No, that's quite alright," Will interrupted, and he almost darted out the cabin door again, but Wentmark called over,

"Come along, William, leave your chores for later, and have some cocoa. Now," he added, once Will and the four newcomer children were settled around the large, fancy table, "Where _is_ your ship?"

"There was a storm," Hermione said, but at the same moment, Harry said,

"It exploded-"

And Malfoy said- "Sunk by pirates."

"During a ferocious storm, pirates snuck up on our ship, exploded it, and sunk us to the deeps," Hermione said quickly, merging the three stories into one.

Will had the feeling she was being less than truthful here, and he wondered why- but not too deeply. Everyone was entitled to their secrets.

"Where's the wreckage?" Wentmark asked sensibly. "My men found nothing to suggest a ship was exploded where we found you, not a rope, nor barrel, nor splinter."

"Actually..." Hermione replied, "um... the pirates didn't explode us _exactly-_ they sort of- um- swam under our ship and bored holes in the hull with an auger, and the whole ship sunk, straight to the bottom. There _was_ no wreckage."

"But they_ tried_ to explode us," Harry put in after an uncomfortable pause.

Wentmark thought about this a moment, then said, "I've actually heard of such a tale."

"Yes- so have I," Hermione said with a nervous smile.

"The Golden Vanity, was it?" Wentmark commented casually, tilting his head to the side. "That poor cabin boy, betrayed by his captain like that. Such a sad folk song."

"Yes..." Hermione went on, "the pirates who sunk us must have been inspired by that very song."

"I imagine so," Wentmark said placidly, though Will could tell he wasn't convinced. "So you mean to say there was _no_ flotsam or jetsam whatever that floated up from your sunken ship? Barrels? Ropes? Chests? Clothes? Flags?"

"Er-" Hermione stammered, "there was, I suppose-"

"But the pirates stole all that," Harry added in.

"And simply left you four survivors to drown?" Wentmark asked.

"Well, we never said they were _nice_ pirates," Malfoy put in sarcastically.

"Where was your ship bound for before this regrettable misfortune befell you?" Wentmark asked interestedly.

"Oh- Australia," Harry said quickly.

"Wiltshire," Malfoy said at the same time.

"Australia?" Wentmark asked, puzzled.

Will had never heard of a place called 'Australia' either. "Where's that?" he asked.

"Basically, England, is where we were going," Hermione corrected. "But we were planning on dropping _him_ off at Australia," she said, glancing irritably at Harry.

"Because we all hate him," Malfoy added in a matter-of-fact monotone. "Because he's a twit."

"Draco's just a bit stressed," Hermione put in apologetically. "What with the ship sinking and his entire family drowning and all. Don't mind him."

Will struggled for words to tell Malfoy how sorry he felt for his loss- how he knew what it was like to lose your parents, in_ both_ senses of the word.

"What?" Malfoy hissed. "Don't be stupid, Granger, my family's fine. And _looking_ for me," he added tartly.

"And he's in denial," Hermione added quickly.

"I am not!"

Hurriedly changing the subject, Hermione said, "Golly, this is lucky! I mean, this really is a baffling coincidence, you sailors finding us so fast. I mean it's been- what would you estimate, Harry?""

"What would I estimate what?" Harry asked, peering over the cracked pewter rim of his mug of hot chocolate.

"Well, never mind all that," said Hermione. "How long has your voyage on the_ Avalon_ been, Will?"

"Three weeks, roughly," Will replied quietly, still disturbed by the thought that these children may, possibly, have lost their families. If their ship truly_ did_ sink, which did seem questionable.

"Where are you from?" Hermione asked Will.

"Basically, England," Will replied flatly, hinting that he didn't exactly want to talk about _his_ past either.

"And where are you going to?" Hermione asked.

"The Caribee Colonies."

"Why?"

"Well don't suffocate him with questions, Hermione," Harry cut in, "he'd tell you if he wanted to."

"No, that's quite alright," Will assured both of them. "I'm sailing to the Caribbean to find my father. He's a merchant sailor, and I know Jamaica was on his shipping route."

"Find him?" Hermione asked curiously, leaning forward over the table, and resting her chin on her knuckles. The lacewing embroidery of Wentmark's shirt stuck to her wet neck distractingly. "Did you lose him?" she persisted. "How'd he go missing?"

Will shrugged miserably, sinking his elbows onto the tabletop, and staring emptily into the rich brown depths of his untouched mug of cocoa. Ginny still hadn't touched her cocoa yet either, Will noticed, and she hadn't said a word so far. Will peered over at her wide, tight, hazy hazel eyes, and wondered if she was a mute. Or mad.

"That's an interesting coin," Hermione commented, which made Will notice that his coin necklace was showing.

Will quickly stuffed it back beneath the ties of his teal shirt.

"Is it a coin necklace to ward off Plague?" Hermione asked.

"If it is, it's not working right, since you're still here," Will said with a gently teasing, dodgy smirk.

"We're_ not_ plague carriers, Hermione explained that," Harry corrected him again. "Pretty thoroughly, actually."

Still staring at Will's neck, and the coin hidden beneath his shirt, Hermione asked, "Is it Mayan? It looked a bit Mayan to me."

Will shrugged again, and said numbly, "My father sent it to me."

The boat swished.

"I hope you find him," Harry said sympathetically.

"Thanks," Will mumbled.

"I wish I could help," Hermione added.

That was also a kind sentiment. "Thanks," Will repeated.

"No, I really could help," Hermione offered.

Will shook his head, and said, "No."

"No, I_ really_ could," Hermione persisted. "I want to. I owe you."

"You owe me nothing."

"Well, except my_ life,"_ Hermione said wryly. "Is that worth nothing, then?"

"I didn't mean-" Will stammered.

"Will, I want to help you. Really! Any way I can. You saved all our lives, and there's nothing we're presently doing, nowhere we're going anymore- and I'm sure Harry and the others would love to help you as well-"

"Speak for yourself, Granger!" Malfoy cut in.

The conversation was getting irritable, and Hermione was dodging all of Wentmark's questions by asking questions of her own and dominating the conversation. Cuing onto these facts, Wentmark said, "Well, that's enough questions for the time being. I'd wager you four could use some rest. You may share William's room this evening. William, why don't you fetch up some extra blankets- I must go consult with the navigator, on the subject of the weather."

"Aye, Captain," Will replied readily.

As the two of them left the cabin, Wentmark closed the door, and on the way down the stairs, as Will hurried on yet again, Wentmark caught him by the arm, leaned down, and asked, "So- what do you think of them?"

"I like them," Will replied honestly, realizing he actually did._ Even Malfoy must probably be sort of alright once one gets to know him_, Will guessed. Uncertainly, he asked, "What do _you_ think of them?"

"I think..." Wentmark said slowly, "it hasn't stormed in weeks."

Will was gripped with a sudden, irrational fear that the normally kind Captain Wentmark would bend to the whims of his unruly, plague-fearing crew, and would have the four newcomers thrown back to the raging mercy of the ocean. Staring nervously up at his captain, searching for excuses to keep the obviously lying children aboard- Will saw that Wentmark was simply smiling up at the cabin door, and saying,

"...But I like them too."


End file.
